The emergence of the idea of ‘the welfare state’ in British political discourse

Introduction

In the years immediately following the Second World War, a new mode of governing took shape in Great Britain, expanding the government's control of social and economic life and altering the relationship between state and citizen. These developments had immediate practical consequences for the British people, above all for workers and their families, and social historians have traced these developments and their impacts in great detail (Timmins, 2017). But the formation of this new governmentality also generated some important ramifications in the realm of ideas, and these have been less well documented and discussed. ¹

For political actors, intellectuals, and commentators, the appearance of this new assemblage of social and economic measures prompted a series of questions: How to conceptualize this new mode of governing? How to characterize its specificity and define its meaning? How to advance its progress or limit its expansion? By the early 1950s, these questions had resulted in the appearance in common discourse and political theory of a newly named idea – ‘the welfare state’ – and a cluster of new concepts and characterizations surrounding it.

Initially, the thing to which these terms applied was not thought of as a ‘thing’ at all. It was viewed as a series of distinct problem-solving measures – social insurance, family allowances, free healthcare, full employment – each with its own origins and purposes and principles. ² Between 1945 and 1948, as the Labour government raced to enact its social reforms, the unity and identity of these new social and economic arrangements was only occasionally suggested. But by 1950, these new programmes and principles were routinely being grouped together as a single entity, and this entity was being referred to as ‘the welfare state’.

Why were these heretofore distinct things subsequently bundled together and conceptualized as a unified phenomenon? ³ For some speakers, the new term was merely a convenient shorthand used to describe the new arrangements and agencies, an encompassing empirical reference with little significance beyond this. But in the context of post-war, reconstruction Britain, the term welfare state also had a more profound meaning, expressing the widely shared sense that the new style of governing heralded by Labour's social legislation was a radical break with the past and signalled the emergence of something new in the world. To many people, the idea of a welfare state expressed a ‘never again’ repudiation of 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism – a political rationality that had ushered in the Great Depression and two world wars (Hennessy, 1992). The 1945 election had given a landslide victory to a socialist government promising a new social order, a new society, a new dispensation. And that new dispensation came to be known – albeit contingently, contestedly, and after the fact – as ‘the welfare state’. ⁴

When it first appeared in the 1940s, welfare state was a political catchphrase, a loosely defined slogan used by journalists and critics. But over time, this catchphrase came to be elaborated as a concept and to take on a central significance in political discourse and in British public life. By the 1950s and 1960s, welfare state had become a key concept in Western politics, a central concern of parties and voters, a constant reference in political journalism, a name for the British nation, and finally an object of analysis in social science. ⁵ But despite this widespread usage, the concept was never stabilized or authoritatively defined. To the contrary: one of the inherent features of the welfare state concept was its constantly changing, essentially contested, polyvalent character – an instability that continues to vex social scientists to this day (Atherton, 2002; Beland, 2011; Viet-Wilson, 2000, 2003; Wincott, 2003). After the 1970s, the phrase welfare state would become freighted with negative connotations and was rarely invoked, even in Labour Party discourse – despite the continuing popularity of some of the core institutions to which the term referred (Garland, 2014).

In this article, I show how the term welfare state emerged in British political discourse and describe the competing efforts to define its meaning and narrate its larger significance. ⁶ To this end, I present 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. ⁷

I distinguish between the development of the welfare state as a set of programmes and technologies (the welfare state apparatus) and the emergence of the welfare state as an idea of what these programmes and that state were or could become (the welfare state concept). A large historical literature has shown that the programmes and technologies that formed the welfare state apparatus were gradually established, one by one, from the mid 19th century onwards, before being subjected to a rapid process of consolidation at the end of the Second World War. And these programmes have mostly persisted, in modified forms, ever since. But beginning in that moment of post-war consolidation, there simultaneously emerged a new name for this entity and a struggle to define, narrate, and direct its trajectory. Competing political actors sought to fit a shaping vision to the emergent apparatus; to gloss the new welfare sector with a larger historical significance; to fix a specific meaning to this new and still-inchoate political reality. ⁸ And if, in the decades since, the welfare state apparatus has become a permanent and more or less stable dimension of modern nations, the meanings of the welfare state concept have been much more fluid, much more controversial, and much more subject to change over time.

This article is an essay in the history of political concepts, not a contribution to the history of social administration and economic management. My focus throughout is on the concept of ‘the welfare state’, its development, and its multiple meanings, not on the institutions, policies, and practices that the term might be taken to be refer to – though, of course, the concept was formed, used, and contested in the context of these institutional developments and in competing efforts to redescribe and redirect these policies and practices. These conceptualizations, definitions, and narratives undoubtedly played a role – a rhetorical, ideological, and justificatory role – in the realpolitik of 20th-century social and economic policy. But establishing the exact nature of that role is a distinct undertaking that I do not address here. Suffice it to say that my project does not imagine that a nation's welfare state apparatus is shaped chiefly by ideas, arguments, and ideology: the welfare state's leading determinants are economic power, technical innovation, and the balance of political forces (Garland, 2014). But I do assume that how social actors talk about the welfare state is consequential and that welfare state discourses operate in combination with (what might crudely be called) more ‘material’ forces to shape real-world outcomes. How powerful social actors imagined the welfare state, how they theorized the welfare state, how they advocated for or against the welfare state, and how the public came to understand the welfare state – all of these, I assume, made a difference. ⁹

The emergence of the term in British political discourse

My interest is in how the concept emerged, how it was narrated and contested, and how, over the course of time, it was subject to processes of displacement, rhetorical redescription, and ideological innovation (Skinner, 1989, 2009). In what follows, I describe the matrix of contestation within which the term has become embedded and show how, through a series of historical contests and contingencies, a complex set of meanings and connotations came to be folded into the multilayered, ambiguous concept that has come down to us in the present.

Contrary to older textbook narratives about ‘the coming of the welfare state’, which assumed that such an entity was always in the process of emerging, the formation of a welfare state concept in British politics was very much a contingent event that took the form of a retrospective naming and a prospective imagining. ¹⁰ As I will show, the idea of a welfare state was not articulated or elaborated in advance. Instead, it was forged and fought over only after its primary empirical referent – the Labour government's post-war social and economic policy – had been definitively established.

Unlike liberalism or socialism – and notwithstanding the writings of English idealists, New Liberals, and Christian Socialists (Clarke, 1978; Collini, 2009) – the welfare state concept did not have an extensive intellectual life before entering the world of practical politics. ¹¹ Instead, it first emerged in journalistic commentary and party-political discourse as a means of describing a set of political developments that had already taken place. It took some time before the phrase took on a conceptual meaning and more time still before it became the object of scholarly analysis by historians and social scientists. As I document below, the historical sources indicate that the welfare state concept emerged as an after-the-fact gloss, providing a generic name for an emergent policy regime or governmentality – a specific regime that had been instituted without any distinct nomenclature or ideology of its own. ¹²

Of course, there are recognizable approximations of the concept that can be discovered in British sources in the earlier part of the 20th century, and the state's responsibility for improving social welfare was a prominent theme from the second half of the 19th century onwards (Harris, 1996; Renwick, 2017). And something like the idea of a welfare state – not sharply defined, and not so named, but recognizable nevertheless – can be glimpsed in the writings of Labour intellectuals and left-leaning liberals in the decades before 1945. Such approximations are present in the writings of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Webb and Webb, 1897; Webb, 1948), for example, with their proposal for a civilized national minimum and their idea of the ‘Housekeeping State’; or in Harold Laski's work The State in Theory and Practice (Laski, 1935), which talked of a ‘positive’ or ‘social service’ state that had displaced the laissez-faire, minimalist state of the 19th century; and in The Old World and the New Society (Labour Party, 1942: 15), a Labour Party manifesto insisting that a ‘democratic society must express itself through a social service state’. ¹³ Similarly, the writings of left-liberal or socialist authors such as Cole (1938), Durbin (1940), Hobson (1932), and Strachey (1936) all carried intimations of a future involving a mixed economy, a planned society, and a social service state.

One can also find the phrase welfare state in occasional use in English-language academic texts from the 1890s onwards, carrying a loosely defined sense that sometimes overlapped with the matrix of meanings conveyed by the phrase after the 1940s. But despite these anticipations, the historical sources clearly indicate that the concept, in any of the senses it subsequently came to bear, was not named and elaborated in the UK until the mid to late 1940s. It is this moment of emergence and initial elaboration that the present article seeks to recover.

The programmes and policies that together formed the institutional core of the welfare state apparatus were not represented, at the moment of their introduction, as elements of a new kind of state or social order. They emerged instead as a wartime programme of consolidating reforms, crafted by a civil servant who drew upon ideas supported by Liberals and Conservatives as well as the Labour Party. William Beveridge's programme, published in 1942, immediately captured the popular imagination, and Labour's embrace of it helped bring about the shock result of the 1945 general election landslide. These reform measures, duly enacted by the Attlee government, while recognizable as the ‘social amelioration’ that Labour had long espoused, had only an oblique relation to the socialist programme that was the Labour Party's distinguishing feature and signature commitment (Jackson, 2007; Tove, 2003: 142).

What came to be known as ‘the welfare state’ was thus enacted before it was theorized and without having been kitted out with a developed ideological rationale. ¹⁴ On the ‘Appointed Day’ (5 July 1948), when the National Health Service (NHS), National Insurance, and National Assistance came into operation, the political meaning of these reforms was still quite inchoate. It was not until a few months later that the Labour Party retrospectively named its creation ‘the welfare state’. And although the welfare state would later come to be sanctified by the British labour movement as its most important progressive achievement, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the concept was viewed with considerable scepticism both by Left intellectuals such as Michael Young and by social policy experts close to the Labour Party such as Richard Titmuss and Peter Townsend. ¹⁵

Origins of the phrase

The phrase welfare state rarely appeared in English-language texts before the late 1940s. And on those occasions when the phrase was used – in the US in the 1890s and in the UK in the 1930s – it was in reports about German politics, where it took the form of a English rendition of the German term Wohlfahrtsstaat.

According to the leading article (Petersen and Petersen, 2013a), the term Wohlfahrtsstaat – combining the German words for ‘welfare’ and ‘state’ – was coined by Carl Nauwerck in 1844 to describe a vision of a state that would ‘satisfy all societal needs’. Thirty years later, the term was taken up by the economist Adolph Wagner, who used it to describe the growing public sector associated with the social reform-oriented state then emerging in Germany (Kaufman, 2013: 66), and by Lorenz von Stein, the founder of public administration, who defined it as ‘a compulsory institution promoting the well-being of the people’. References also appeared in German social policy debates in the 1920s, when the term was used to describe the social policies of the Weimar Republic: Max Weber, for example, used the term in his discussion of legitimate domination. And it was during the Weimar era that conservatives took to using it in a disparaging sense, as when Chancellor von Papen declared that the Wohlfahrtsstaat had ‘weakened the moral strength of the nation’ (Petersen and Petersen, 2013a). ¹⁶ In the USA, scholars translated Wohlfahrtsstaat as ‘welfare state’, and this anglicized phrase, with its Germanic reference, occasionally appeared in American academic texts from the 1890s onwards. ¹⁷

By the late 1930s, the term had come unmoored from its German associations and was being used by American social scientists as a concept with which to describe a newly emergent form of social democratic government (Ebenstein, 1939). Shortly thereafter, the term crossed over from the academy into the language of American political debate, where it was used to convey both a positive and a negative appraisal. So, for example, supporters of Democratic president Harry Truman welcomed his Fair Deal proposals as an extension of America's welfare state, while Republican critics equated the term with socialism and totalitarianism (Glueck, 1949).

In the UK, the phrase welfare state appeared in academic discourse from the late 1920s onwards, though in these texts (which were mostly in the new field of International Relations), the term's meaning straddled two rather different conceptions: sometimes signifying the liberal antithesis of an authoritarian power state, sometimes suggesting the social democratic antithesis of laissez-faire government. ¹⁸ It first appeared in print in Christianity and the State, in which bishop of Manchester William Temple used the phrase ‘welfare-state’ as a contrast to the ‘power-state’, though without further elaboration (Temple, 1928). Four years later, Temple's Oxford colleague Alfred Zimmern used the phrase in his book Quo Vadimus (Zimmern, 1934) – again, in contradistinction to ‘power-state’ and again without elaboration. However, judging from Zimmern's other writings, the welfare state he had in mind was close to one of the core meanings connoted by the term in its post-1940s usage, namely, a state that acted as ‘a vigorous agent in removing hindrances to well-being and in the promotion of social services of numerous and varied types’ (Zimmern, 1930). In 1937, the economist Sir George Schuster (1937: 518) wrote that ‘the best way for what I term “welfare” states to undermine the influence of dictators in “power” states is to show that they themselves produce welfare for their people’. This usage also appears around the same time in the work of Schuman (1937) and – as the subject of a critique – in Carr (1939). ¹⁹ In the course of the following decade, this usage appears to have entirely disappeared.

My survey of British texts of the 1930s shows the phrase being put to a variety of uses, some referring to recent German history, some evoking a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian states, and some using it to describe a post-laissez-faire state. ²⁰ But it was not until the early 1940s that the phrase came to be used in the UK, referring to the UK, and clearly bearing the connotation of a state providing social and economic security to its citizens.

The first such usage was by A. L. Rowse in The Spirit of English History (Rowse, 1943), a book commissioned by the British Council to boost wartime morale. Rowse wrote that in the years following the First World War, ‘much was done to alleviate the ills caused by the earlier industrialism.… The State was in the process of turning itself into a Welfare State.’ Shortly thereafter, we find the phrase in an editorial in the left-wing weekly magazine The New Statesman: ‘The Tories’ idea is that the State should stand, above all else, for the protection of private property: the aim of all progressives is a welfare State standing, above all else, for the protection of men and women’ (18 November 1944).

The first extended account of the term – where the welfare state concept was used to refer to the social and economic policies introduced by the post-war Labour government – appeared in The Economist on 27 November 1948:

For a generation or so, Britain has been moving away from the old, acquisitive, economic society towards the welfare state. This change can be seen in a number of ways. It can be seen in the great growth of Social Security, not merely the enactment of ever more costly schemes of endowment for the individual, but in the growth of the belief in all parties that the object of industry is not to create wealth but to provide jobs, that the aim of public policy should not be efficiency for the community but security and protection for the individual. It can be seen in the enormous growth of the influence of the state – not perhaps, until the last three years, in state ownership, but in state control and state financing.

This was followed soon after by a leading article in The Times of 27 May 1949 that surely did much to establish the phrase and one of its core meanings. Under the heading ‘The Welfare State’, the editors wrote:

A movement towards the development of the welfare State … has been common to most western European nations since the war.… The chief features are the increasing concern, some would say interference, of the Government with the day-to-day lives of the people, the growing influence of workers’ representatives on the conduct of affairs, and provision for social security.

And we can mark the definitive entry of the term into English usage as occurring in 1950, when the fourth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English introduced a new entry defining a welfare state as ‘one which has national health, insurance and other social services’ (quoted in Marsh, 1964: 13).

What these sources collectively suggest is that between 1943 and 1950, the new phrase welfare state – variously set by typographers as ‘Welfare state’, ‘welfare State’, ‘Welfare State’, or ‘welfare-state’ and with a range of meanings, which I discuss below – migrated from the restricted domain of academic scholarship to become part of the broader lexicon of British political argument, journalism, and commentary.

Labour's legislative programme

The social policies and programmes that came to be referred to as constituting the welfare state apparatus were enacted between 1944 and 1948 without any mention of the phrase welfare state. During that period, neither the Labour government nor labour movement intellectuals articulated this larger idea of a welfare state; nor did they situate specific pieces of legislation within this more general conception.

Of course, in 1942, Beveridge had set out his scheme for social security and outlined a large-scale reconstruction plan designed to vanquish the ‘five giants’ of Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Squalor, and Disease. But despite his broad ambition and his focus on social security, Beveridge never invoked the concept of a ‘welfare state’. His famous report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, makes no mention of a ‘welfare state’. And though Beveridge frequently talked of his ‘Plan for Social Security’, ‘a better Britain’, ‘Security with Freedom’, and even ‘a new Britain’, his speeches and public lectures made no mention of a ‘welfare state’; nor did the concept appear under another name (Beveridge, 1944). Later, when ‘Beveridgism’ came to be viewed as synonymous with ‘welfare statism’, Beveridge emphatically rejected the term and its statist, ‘Santa Claus’ implications, countering with the idea of a ‘social service state’, which stressed duties rather than rights (Harris, 1997: 452), and later with the phrase ‘welfare society’, which pointed to community action, voluntarism, and individual responsibility (Watson, 1957).

The Labour Party did not argue for a ‘welfare state’ in any of its manifestos or policy documents in the 1930s or 1940s; nor did any of the Fabian Tracts that supplied much of the expertise for Labour policy. Labour did, of course, advocate reforms such as healthcare, pensions, and unemployment benefits, but these were deemed measures of ‘social amelioration’ rather than steps towards the party's core project of building a socialist commonwealth, and it was to the latter rather than the former that the party's intellectuals devoted their attention. Planning was prominent in these texts, as were nationalization, economic controls, and full employment, but a ‘welfare state’ was nowhere discussed. ²¹

None of the speakers in parliamentary debates on the Beveridge Report, the National Insurance Act, the National Assistance Act, the National Health Service Act, or the Child Allowances Act made any mention of a ‘welfare state’. Not even Archbishop William Temple, who gave a long speech in the Lords about the Beveridge Report without once mentioning the term he had supposedly invented years before. The same is true of the official publicity leading up to the Appointed Day, on which the social security and healthcare schemes came into operation. In preparing the details of that launch, deputy prime minister Herbert Morrison proposed that the scheme should be described as ‘the most comprehensive Act of Social Security the world has ever known’ (Wildy, 1992). Similarly, when Prime Minister Attlee made his BBC broadcast on the eve of the Appointed Day, he referred not to the creation of a ‘welfare state’ but simply to a ‘great scheme of social security for all’. ²²

Labour's belated embrace of the phrase

The absence of the phrase in Labour Party discourse was likely a reaction to the fact that by the late 1940s, Conservative MPs were using the phrase in a derogatory way that echoed von Papen's charge of moral degeneracy and American usages identifying it with totalitarianism. ²³ In the face of these negative characterizations, Labour Party officials drew back from the phrase. We see this in the parliamentary debates of spring 1949, when Conservatives accused the Labour government of seeking to establish a ‘welfare state’ and Labour spokesmen vehemently repudiated the notion. Here, for example, is Nye Bevan's parliamentary private secretary, Major Donald Bruce MP, responding to a Conservative attack in the House of Commons:

The Opposition say that we are in a welfare State.… The true picture is that this country is not a welfare State at all. At the moment this country is an investment State. The over-whelming mass of our national income is going towards investments in the future.

Two months later, Lord Pakenham, a Labour minister in the House of Lords, responded to a Tory accusation that the welfare state was ‘a tyranny’ with the following:

The noble Earl has asked me to repudiate the welfare State. I am forced back on the old question: what does one mean by the ‘welfare State’? But certainly in the sense that I think the noble Earl has in mind, I am ready to repudiate it.… We have moved far from the era of laissez faire. We have entered what Lord Lindsay and others have called ‘the era of the positive State’.

Here, we see Labour representatives distance themselves from the phrase, seeking to avoid being tainted by what Conservatives ‘sneeringly call the welfare State’, as Jenny Lee MP commented in the Commons on 14 July 1949. But since Labour's mode of governing was evidently quite different from the laissez-faire regime of the 1930s, they also reached for less problematic characterizations of that new mode with phrases such as ‘investment state’ and ‘positive state’.

Late in 1949, Labour's resistance to the phrase faded, and party leaders, including Prime Minister Attlee, embraced the idea. ²⁴ They were encouraged in this by left-wing political journalists Kingsley Martin and Michael Foot, who were early adopters of the new terminology. Martin's magazine, The New Statesman, had used the phrase in a positive sense as early as 1944, and in March 1949, Tribune, the Left's other leading journal (which Foot edited), talked of ‘fair shares for all, secure employment, children's allowances, a magnificent health service – all these and many other blessings of the welfare state’. The following month, a New Statesman editorial (30 July 1949) defined ‘the welfare State’ as Labour's social democratic replacement for ‘the enslaving bonds of materialistic capitalism’.

In the run-up to the general election of February 1950, Labour leaders began to follow suit. The first such use was by Ernest Bevin, Labour's secretary of state for foreign affairs. In a Commons debate on 14 July 1949, Bevin described the welfare state as a mode of government that had recently emerged everywhere, albeit in a variety of forms: ‘This so-called welfare State has developed everywhere. The United States is as much a welfare State as we are, only in a different form.’ ²⁵ Two months later, Labour's minister of National Insurance, James Griffiths MP, told a Trades Union Congress audience that ‘the welfare State mean[s] the application to the nation of the code held dear by the family’. ²⁶ And in a Lords debate on 27 September 1949, the Labour peer Frederick Pethick-Lawrence described ‘the great ideals of the present Government’ as being ‘full employment, the welfare State, a good standard of life’, to which his Labour colleague Lord Darwen added: ‘We have built up here a really wonderful welfare State.’ Finally, in the House of Commons on 24 October 1949, Prime Minister Attlee used the phrase for the first time, in a speech outlining the spending cuts necessitated by the currency devaluation his government had just announced: ‘The measures, many of them most distasteful, which we are taking are necessary and consequential on the decision to devalue. They do not affect the main structure of the welfare State.’ ²⁷

Somewhat surprisingly, in light of their previously derogatory use of the term, the Conservative Party leadership embraced the phrase welfare state and used the term with approval months before Labour's leaders did. Reporting on an election speech by Winston Churchill on 8 February 1949, The Times related that the Tory Party leader had reminded his Welsh audience that he had been a Liberal Party comrade of the great Welshman David Lloyd George, ‘who launched the liberal forces of this country effectively into the broad stream of social betterment and social security’. This great stream of social progress, declared Churchill, was ‘nowadays … called “the welfare State”.… We did not christen it but it was our child.’ Nor was this a one-off remark. In a general election broadcast in 1951, Churchill proclaimed ‘the whole policy of social reform, the welfare state as it is now called, was the policy of the National Government of which I was the head’. ²⁸

Churchill's embrace of the term was probably a response to the popularity of the new social security and NHS reforms and an attempt to ensure that they were not credited exclusively to Labour. He may also have been seeking to reverse missteps the Conservative leadership had taken in 1943, when they refused to endorse the Beveridge Report, leaving it to Labour to claim the mantle of social reform and social security in the 1945 election. ²⁹ Within a few months, Churchill's position was being taken up more broadly: for example, in a letter to The Times in May 1950, Conservative MP Cyril Osborne insisted that the Tories ‘believe just as passionately in a welfare State as the radicals’, claiming that all that now divided Conservatives from socialists was how best to maintain it.

The multiple meanings of welfare state

The new name caught on. By the early 1950s, it was being referred to in political debate, in the press, and in satire, cartoons, and comedy. ³⁰ It resonated because it captured something important not just about social insurance and welfare benefits but about the ‘new society’ that many believed to be emerging in these post-war years. Perhaps too, some of the term's utility lay in the fact that it contained a constructive ambiguity, referring to a raft of social legislation but also hinting at a grander project of social reconstruction – a semantic breadth not provided by narrower generic terms such as ‘the new Social Services’, ‘the great scheme of Social Security’, or simply ‘Social Welfare’. Welfare state more closely captured the sense of an unfolding social revolution that so many commentators pointed to in the Britain of the immediate post-war years. ³¹ At the same time, its grandiosity made it an easy target for satirists and sceptics, which only added to the frequency of its use.

The phrase welfare state soon became embedded in UK political discourse. As a former Labour minister put it: ‘It is one of Labour's major achievements, not only to have built the general structure of the Welfare State, but to have implanted the concept of the Welfare State … deeply in the national conscience’ (Soskice, 1954). But the concept never ceased to be controversial, and users of the phrase frequently referred to ‘the so-called welfare state’ (Martin, 1951: 2). Of course, any political programme will attract varying descriptions and appraisals, and we would expect some speakers to use welfare state as a term of approbation, some as a term of abuse, and others in a way intended to be dispassionately descriptive. But even when speakers used the term positively and descriptively, it is clear that they were often referring to rather different things.

Some of these differences were highlighted by a Times editorial of 9 February 1950 describing the contrasting conceptions embraced by Labour and the Conservatives:

The two parties clearly stand for different models of the welfare State, and hold different conceptions of the extent and purpose of State action for the redistribution of income and property.… In its attitude to the welfare State, the Labour Party's stress falls increasingly on the promotion of equality, that of the Conservatives on achieving a satisfactory minimum for all.

The same point was made by Labour politicians, who complained that Tories cynically supported the welfare state's ‘façade’ while proceeding to undermine its finances and thus its foundations. As historians have recently emphasized, the supposed bipartisan consensus around the welfare state was always somewhat superficial, with each party investing the term with rather different meanings (Lowe, 1990).

But beyond this party divide, there was a deeper set of disagreements about what the welfare state was and about its proper role in Britain's future. No sooner had the welfare state been named than the ideological-discursive struggles began, with multiple actors striving to define the new concept and shape its significance.

In the two decades after the war, we observe the welfare state concept being framed and discussed 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. In each of these framings, analyses could be more or less elaborate and appraisals could be positive, negative, and sometimes neutral. In the following sections, I describe these usages and the range of meanings and appraisals that the new concept was made to convey.

The welfare state as a set of programmes

The most frequently invoked meaning of the term – I will call it the empirical reference – used welfare state as a generic term for the new social services and institutions of social security. In this usage, people wrote that ‘the UK has a welfare state’ – meaning that it had in place an apparatus, a set of policies, a welfare sector.

Used in this sense, welfare state would typically refer to the institutions of social security that protected employees and their families, together with public education, the NHS, child allowances, and food subsidies. Occasionally, the reference would be broader, pointing to fiscal policy, full employment, and planning policies as well as the social services.

Examples of the narrower usage include the remarks by Hugh Gaitskell MP, whose Commons speech of 24 April 1950 referred to ‘that great system of social services, which has come to be known as the welfare State’, or the 1950 Oxford English Dictionary entry that defined a ‘welfare state’ as ‘one which has national health, insurance, and other social services’. An example of the broader reference would be an editorial in The New Statesman on 9 July 1949 referring to ‘fair shares … food subsidies, rationing, price control and the whole apparatus of the planned Welfare State’. ³²

As well as referring to specific social services and policies, speakers who referred to the welfare state in this sense frequently invoked the principles that the new programmes and policies embodied. As an empirical matter, Labour's new welfare state apparatus exhibited a range of distinct administrative principles. To be eligible for NHS services, or for state education through secondary school, the only legal requirement was UK residence or citizenship. For National Insurance and old-age pensions, the eligibility requirement was a sufficient history of payroll contributions (or else being a dependent of an insured person with the relevant contribution record). For National Assistance, eligibility turned on a showing of need as indicated by an income below a certain level, whereas for child allowances, all families with two or more children were eligible, whatever their income and resources. Numerous articles and commentaries pointed to these varied principles and their role in shaping provision (Hagenbuch, 1953; Hobman, 1953; Robson, 1957). ³³ But descriptions of the welfare state's principles often entailed a more normative, rhetorical aspect. Instead of enumerating extant principles, they presented evaluative accounts, highlighting preferred values and claiming that these were – or ought to be – the essential principles of the emerging regime.

A striking example of a normative gloss being layered onto empirical description is T. H. Marshall's famous depiction of the post-war welfare state as a set of public goods uniformly and universally available to citizens as a matter of right (Marshall, 1950). This universalist vision was echoed by Nye Bevan, who depicted his NHS legislation as conferring a universal set of social rights that made free healthcare ‘the birthright of every citizen’ – an arrangement that he viewed as definitively socialist (Bevan, 1950: 14). In the same year, Labour's manifesto, Let Us Win Through Together, claimed that this birthright extended beyond healthcare to include social security more generally: ‘Labour has honoured the pledge it made in 1945 to make social security the birthright of every citizen’ (Labour Party, 1950c). This socialist reading of welfare state principles also appeared in Kingsley Martin's 1951 Fabian Tract Socialism and the Welfare State, which described ‘the principles of the Welfare State’ as being that ‘everyone has the right to a job and a guaranteed minimum of health, wealth and leisure’ (Martin, 1951: 1).

By contrast, the ‘welfare state’ embraced by Conservative politicians and writers was much more narrowly defined, based on principles that were close to traditional notions of aid to the poor and hostile to egalitarian universalism. As the 1949 Conservative Party manifesto, The Right Road for Britain, put it:

The Social Services are … a co-operative system of mutual aid and self-help provided by the whole nation and designed to give to all the basic minimum of security, of housing, of opportunity, of employment, and of living standards below which our duty to one another forbids us to permit anyone to fall.

‘Mutual aid’ here meant aid to the needy on a minimal basis, not an all-embracing web of mutualism in which all citizens partook equally. And the stress was on self-help rather than solidarity. As Conservative MP Anthony Fell observed in a Commons debate of 8 November 1951, ‘If the Welfare State is to mean anything, it must mean a State in which all people are encouraged to become thrifty and responsible so that they can look after their own welfare.’

Throughout the 1950s – in Conservative policy documents such as One Nation: A Tory Approach to Social Problems (Conservative Party, 1950) and The Social Services: Needs and Means (Conservative Party, 1952), in the editorials of The Economist, and, after 1955, in the pamphlets of the Institute of Economic Affairs – we see Conservatives reject the principle of universality and the idea that welfare provision should take the form of de-commodified public goods – an egalitarian principle they viewed as an assault on private property. Instead, the Conservative welfare state was to be a selective, means-tested safety net providing a basic minimum to those in need. Its function was to provide a last-resort back-up to the market and self-help, not to provide a socialistic alternative to them.

The welfare state as a socio-economic order

A second set of meanings attaching to the new phrase referred to it not as a bundle of programmes but more structurally as a new kind of socio-economic order, one characterized not just by social services but also by practices of planning and economic management and the legal recognition of the role of trade unions in collective bargaining. This is the usage adopted by E. H. Carr in 1951 – ‘We have reached a point in history where the process of transition from the nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalist order offers us no alternative … to a social and economic order to which we can give the name of the “welfare state”’ (Carr, 1951: 17) – and by the American academic A. A. Rogow in the same year: ‘The term “Welfare State” is used to describe a mixed economy with an admixture of State responsibility for employment, social services, and an egalitarian distribution of income’ (Rogow, 1951: 11). ³⁴

This notion of the welfare state as a social order rather than a set of services was also implied by the common locution that spoke of the experience of ‘living in’ a welfare state (e.g. The New Statesman and Nation, 4 June 1949).

This social-systemic framing – call it the political economy reference – was especially common among socialist intellectuals, who struggled to locate the new social and economic order within an existing conception of political economy organized around a binary opposition between capitalism and socialism. Within that milieu, the idea of the welfare state as a semi-socialist or semi-capitalist political economy was a recurring one in the late 1940s and 1950s. Cole (1949: 13; original emphasis) referred to it as kind of ‘bastard socialism’, which was to say, ‘Liberalism plus Planning, with extended Social Security and more redistributive taxation, but without the abolition of class-distinctions or the institution of democracy as an all-pervading principle of social structure’. The following year, Martin (1950: 561) referred to it as a ‘Keynesian version of capitalism’. And in an essay on ‘Democratic Socialism’ published in Tribune on 3 January 1950, Labour MP John Strachey argued that Labour's social democratic welfare state demonstrated the viability of a third-way social order, intermediate between capitalism and socialism (Strachey, 1950). Whichever side writers took in these debates – embracing the welfare state as a new vision of socialism, as with Tony Crosland (1956), or viewing it as ‘essentially bourgeois’ and ‘social-bureaucratic State capitalism’, as Saville (1957) and MacKenzie (1958) put it, respectively – they presented a conception of the welfare state as a distinctive political economy.

Interestingly, the best-known definition of the welfare state, by the economic historian Asa Briggs, also framed the welfare state as a distinctive socio-economic order in the sense I have been discussing here. His famous definition put it thus:

A welfare state is a state in which organized power is deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces in at least three directions – first, by guaranteeing individuals and families a minimum income irrespective of the market value of their work or their property; second, by narrowing the extent of insecurity by enabling individuals and families to meet certain ‘social contingencies’ (for example, sickness, old age, and unemployment) which lead otherwise to individual and family crises; and third, by ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the best standards available in relation to a certain agreed range of social services. ³⁵

He then added that

Like any definition, this statement proceeded from definite theoretical and empirical premises and entailed judgements about what was, and what was not, essential to the phenomenon in question. For Briggs, a welfare state ensured an optimum, not a minimum, and included all citizens in its solidaristic reach, not just the poor and the destitute. He insisted that a true welfare state – one that fitted the definitional stipulations – necessarily exhibited the universalism and egalitarianism preferred by socialist proponents, and went well beyond the ‘social service state’ previously advocated by Attlee and by Beveridge. That Briggs’ definition would quickly become a standard reference point in social science, despite what conservatives and libertarians would regard as its highly tendentious character, is therefore quite revealing. ³⁶

Leftist intellectuals such as Strachey (1950, 1951), Martin (1951), and Mannheim (1951) were inclined to the view that the welfare state was a distinct and relatively stable form of political economy that might provide the basis for further developments in the socialization of the economy and the creation of more egalitarian social relations. But other socialist thinkers – for example Balogh (1949), Cole (1955), and Saville (1957) – insisted that the economic structure of a welfare state was necessarily precarious and always liable to be undercut by the requirements of capital. Strikingly, several right-wing critics of the welfare state – most notably Hayek (1944, 1956) and von Mises (1944) – adopted a view that was a mirror image of this thesis, claiming that the welfare state was an inherently unstable and contradictory formation that would sooner or later devolve into an authoritarian state socialism, bringing economic and political freedoms to an end.

In the immediate post-war years, the welfare state's most forceful libertarian critics began from a dichotomous conception of political economy similar to that of their left-wing counterparts. But whereas some socialists were open to the possibility of a via media, liberals such as Friedrich von Hayek (1944) and von Mises (1944) were adamant that there could be no middle way between free-market capitalism and authoritarian socialism. To embark on a supposed middle way, as proponents of a ‘planned society’ intended, was to step down a path that would inevitably lead to authoritarianism.

For these critics, some of whom had witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the horrors of Nazism, there was no halfway house between an unfettered, free-enterprise economy and a command economy directed by the state. Each act of state planning and every move towards a welfare state amounted to a fateful step on ‘the road to serfdom’ (Hayek, 1944) or to the creation of an ‘minotaur state’ (de Jouvenel, 1949) in which individual freedoms would be crushed by the totalitarian power of ‘omnicompetent government’ (von Mises, 1944).

The welfare state as a new type of state

For a third group of speakers in this period, to talk of the welfare state was not to refer to a set of social services or to a mixed economy. It was to point to a new kind of state: to a specific form of political association, founded on a new social contract, and expressed in a new form of government.

In this usage – call it the political reference – the phrase welfare state invoked a new corporate entity in and through which the will of the British people found expression. This new state was based on a revised social contract that gave authority to government executives on the condition that they govern in ways that promoted the values of social security, social justice, and social citizenship. In this usage, people wrote that ‘the UK is a welfare state’ – meaning that the British polity had taken on a new character.

For these speakers, the concept of the welfare state had a deeper, more normative meaning, referring not to a governmental sector but to a new kind of political association. Welfare state referred to a corporate moral entity, defined by its normative commitment to welfare and its responsibility for the flourishing of each individual and the security and prosperity of the population as a whole. As Clement Attlee announced in October 1949, ‘We have set ourselves the task in this country of creating the welfare state, a state that seeks security and happiness for all. Great progress has been made.’ ³⁷

This sense was less frequently invoked than the other two, perhaps because the concept of the state has never been prominent in British traditions of political thought (Kaufman, 2013: 124). And in this period at least, it was rarely theorized or elaborated to any great degree. But it was present nevertheless, and some of Britain's most prominent academics and public intellectuals, such as T. H. Marshall and E. H. Carr, talked of the welfare state in this political sense.

The welfare state was first theorized in a serious way as a state in Marshall's 1949 public lectures on citizenship and social class. Although the published version of the lectures (Marshall, 1950) mentions the phrase only once, in passing and without elaboration, Marshall argued that 20th-century social policy – in other words, the new welfare state – formed the institutional basis for ‘full’ citizenship and a new kind of ‘social right’. Marshall's gloss on the Beveridge-Attlee reforms elevated these social policies and their principles to the level of a new social contract and a new kind of state, and he articulated at length what that entailed (Baldwin, 1994). As he would later put it, ‘A welfare state is one in which the government has assumed responsibility for ensuring or promoting the welfare of its citizens’ (Marshall, 1967: 30). Marshall's lectures, which were reported in The Times, soon became a reference point, would be repeatedly cited in years to come (e.g. Hall, 1952), and have since become a classic reference in the welfare state literature.

Two years later, in a book entitled The New Society, E. H. Carr referred to the post-war ‘social revolution’ and the associated ‘transition from the “night-watchman” to the … “welfare” state’. Carr defined the latter as

the state of which we demand that it shall bring about a larger measure of equality than ever before between its citizens – ‘fair shares for all’; that it should as far as possible ensure both freedom and equality of opportunity for all; that it should so plan and direct the national economy that the periodical crises inherent in the laissez faire systems should be avoided; that full employment may be secured for all who are able to work.

This conception depicted the welfare state as a new kind of state, bound by a new social contract to undertake new responsibilities (managing the national economy, guaranteeing full employment, providing social security, etc.), and committed to a new set of values, variously described as fair shares, security for all, solidarity, parity of esteem, public service, and social rights.

This novel concept of what the state was, or was in the process of becoming, amounted to what Strachey (1950) called ‘a new fact in the world’. Of course, the techniques upon which welfare statism relied – social insurance, progressive taxation, labour market organization, Keynesian demand management – existed prior to their take-up by the Attlee government. And there were plenty of phrases – social security, the social services, state intervention, collectivism, and so on – with which to refer to these ways of doing things. What was new was this emerging vision of a new kind of society and a new kind of state expressed in a new concept, ‘the welfare state’.

Of course, the idea of a state that governed in ways that promoted public welfare was hardly novel. But the concept of the welfare state was new: first, because it signalled the instituting of new and expanded notions of the people's welfare that included economic security, full employment, a national minimum, free healthcare, free education, social rights, and so on; and second, because it referenced a newly consolidated assemblage of techniques and programmes through which these rights and benefits could routinely be delivered.

These rights and entitlements were based upon – and expressed – new expectations on the part of the people and new commitments on the part of government. Popular expectations and governmental commitments of this kind had gradually emerged over the previous century, but the ‘People's War’ (Calder, 1992) caused them to be consolidated, made comprehensive, and offered as the basis for a new kind of social compact, a new kind of citizenship, and a new kind of state. When the phrase welfare state began to appear in political discourse in the late 1940s and 1950s, this was one of the core meanings that it expressed.

This conception of the welfare state as a new kind of state based on a reformulated social contract emerged at the end of the 1940s. For the most part, its usage was aspirational and future-oriented. People talked of having laid the foundations of the welfare state, of building a welfare state, of moving towards a welfare state. ³⁹ Labour may have enacted National Insurance, National Assistance, and the NHS, and instituted planning, nationalization, and full employment, but the welfare state was an ideal that was still in the early stages of being realized, an aspirational undertaking that would guide current politics and project them into a different future.

Conservatives responded to this line of argument by insisting that the welfare state was not ‘the state’ but merely a collection of social services that the state had chosen to provide. In an article in The Listener, responding to a recent radio address by Richard Titmuss, Enoch Powell MP contrasted the Tory conception of ‘the social services’ with the socialist conception of a universalist, citizenship-based ‘social service state’ (Powell, 1952). ⁴⁰ Titmuss, echoing T. H. Marshall, had argued that social services ought to be universal and to have a ‘citizenship quality’. Powell objected to the claim that social service entitlements had come to be ‘a mark of membership in the community’, insisting that ‘this is, in the fullest … sense of the word, the socialist conception’ (Powell, 1952: 619; original emphasis) – one that would, he insisted, ultimately lead to the levelling of incomes and the abolition of private property. And in a Political Quarterly article the following year, Powell (1953) took pains to deny the implication that the welfare state was a state, arguing that such an idea ought to be repudiated by Conservatives on the grounds that welfare was not the modern state's raison d’être but merely a function it undertook to the extent that needs required and resources permitted.

Conclusion

The appearance of these three senses of welfare state – social programmes, socio-economic order, social state – marked the entry into political thought of a concept that was complex, layered, and contested. It also marked the coming to self-consciousness of a new governmentality that had been assembled over the prior century but was now – in the wake of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the ‘social revolution’ of the mid 1940s – articulated in the lexicon of government and the language of political debate. It was the historical moment when the welfare state was accepted as a political fact and articulated as a political concept – though the status of that fact and the meaning of that concept were far from settled.

No one did more to deepen analysis of the welfare state and its political significance than the historical sociologist T. H. Marshall. According to Marshall's famous thesis, post-war Britain had rewritten the social contract and established a new form of political association entailing ‘social rights’, ‘parity of esteem’, and a grounded expectation of mutual support. For all members of the political community, ‘full citizenship’ had been achieved, countering market inequalities and social class with equal rights and social status ensured by the state.

In light of the importance of Marshall's analysis, it may appear ironic that he himself hesitated to use the phrase welfare state and on various occasions indicated his discomfort with its use – as indeed did William Beveridge, Richard Titmuss, Michael Young, Peter Townsend, and other leading social policy experts. ⁴¹ But the analysis presented here suggests Marshall's caution in this regard was well founded. The welfare state concept was, from the beginning, unstable and ambiguous: a placeholder for ongoing political disputes rather than a settled conceptual category with which to resolve them; a reversible term that could serve the enemies of social democracy as well as it served its friends. Nor did it operate as a representation that simply reflected 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.