Abstract
The resilience of the welfare state is remarkable. It has survived national political contexts, which for decades have been characterized by privatization, economic austerity and tax cuts. So there is a need to better understand what the welfare state does and continues to provide. David Garland has written such a text in the popular Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introductions series. It is a cogent summary of a wealth of research conducted with the welfare state as organizing principle. The reader is presented with a condense history of government, written from the perspective of social insurance, social assistance and social services more generally. As such, it is a reminder of the continued potency of the nation state and a welcome corrective to notions of the dismantling of the welfare state, which often go uncontested within current criminology.
The welfare state is often associated with a specific phase of capitalism, the golden years following the Second World War and ending in the oil crises, the stagflation and the right wing turns in the 1970s. Discussions on which kind of state that was replacing the Fordist welfare state took off already in the 1980s, stimulated by Joachim Hirsch in Germany, Bob Jessop in Britain and Michel Aglietta in France, who all came to be loosely grouped under the label of ‘regulation school’. The underlying idea was that the mode of regulation was changing along with the ‘accumulation regime’ and that a new kind of state was emerging out of the conflicts. The ‘post-fordist’ phase of capitalism had supposedly left social security behind. David Garland, on the other hand, treats the ‘welfare state’ as a generic feature of all advanced capitalist societies. The nationally organized welfare state is seen to have survived the onslaught of neo-liberalism, privatization, new public management and globalization.
In a criminological context, this is a point well taken, since there is a tendency to reify images of the punitive state – or the ‘centaur state’ advanced by Wacquant, which is ‘liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom’ (Wacquant, 2010: 217). True, welfare in the narrow sense of social assistance has suffered severe cutbacks, while much the same marginalized social groups have been hit by the inflated institutions of criminal justice, while immoral or outright criminal behaviour within the capitalist class is overlooked. But there is something about proportions that Garland effectively corrects. Both groups are very small. In no known country does the capitalist class exceed 2% of the population. And the social segments plagued by prison sentences, institutional care and long-term unemployment are equally marginal in the total scheme of things, with the well-known US exception. In Europe, quantitative class analysis usually ends up dismissing any notion of the underclass.
The metaphor of the ‘centaur state’ suggests that there is a top and a bottom, and nothing in between. It is a misleading metaphor. For roughly 90% of the population – for the entire middle class and the overwhelming majority of the working class – the welfare state has not been dismantled, or replaced by anything radically new. As Garland shows, neoliberal ‘welfare reform’ affected social assistance and the way in which education and health care and other social services were provided. But it did not touch the social insurance schemes. They are on much the same level as before. Sickness benefits, pensions and unemployment benefits do not display downward trends. And social services of high quality are available to a large majority, although work-related stress has increased among employees in the educational and health care sector. Most of the welfare state is still in place for most people.
For criminologists studying the penal state and the political forces that surfeit it, the material in the book offers a useful corrective. Yet somewhat surprisingly, given Garland’s previous work on ‘penal welfarism’ and the ‘culture of control’, he does not discuss the relationship between what Bourdieu called the right and the left hand of the state. The book would have benefitted from at least a short discussion of competing takes on the development of modern state government. After all, ‘the welfare state’ is heavily focused on the provision of social security and social service as mechanisms for governance under capitalism. A different set of literature – in the footsteps of Robert Kagan and David Vogel – would talk about ‘social regulation’ to improve, for instance, occupational health and safety, or to protect consumer and environmental interests, in the face of specific market failures. It maintains that this kind of state-induced regulation has grown steadily for more than a century but discusses rather similar phenomena under a different name, as the research interest is more geared towards business regulation, technical risk governance and the organization of markets. Equally far removed from commonsensical notions of ‘dismantling’ or ‘de-regulation’, there is the research inspired by Foucault’s writings on ‘biopower’ and different governmental rationalities. Existing studies on population control, social engineering and racial politics can be seen to illuminate further aspects of the welfare state as a mode of governing ‘the social’.
In these respects, the book reproduces some of the weaknesses of the underlying research on the ‘welfare state’, which since its inception has tended to be empirically focused and guided by a strong normative commitment to the phenomena under study. Here, the normative embrace of the welfare state is explicit – along the lines: it may not be ideal but the best we can get. The embrace is substantiated by a functionalist account of governance under capitalism in which the ‘welfare state’ oscillates between being ‘a damage-limiting, problem-solving device’ (p. 11) and ‘a fundamental dimension of modern government’ (p. 133), which does not pay sufficient attention to constitutive social struggles or structural contradictions.
The book is a convincing antidote to conceptions of the welfare state as something that is being dismantled or superseded and argues implicitly for the continued importance of the nation state. It is further empirically nuanced and contains a good discussion of the varieties of welfare states which is sensitive to differences between countries and historic situation. But it does not discuss the different dimensions of state action or the relationship between them. There are a number of competing terminologies – the ‘capitalist’ state, the ‘penal’ state, the ‘regulatory’ state, the ‘welfare’ state, ‘social regulation’ and ‘biopower’ – which are to some extent relative to research tradition. Yet they also point towards the multifaceted and at times contradictory nature of current state policies. The universalistic provision of social security to 90% of the population is one thing, police crackdown in socially marginalized areas another thing and the responsive regulation of corporate codes of conduct quite another, not to mention state programmes to further gender equality or manage food safety. I do not want to criticize an introductory book with an undergraduate and general audience in mind for not trying to account for the various modes of state action. But it might be worth mentioning in a journal with a scholarly audience. For by not doing it – by not trying to relate the ‘welfare state’ to other modes of state action – it is made identical with the state government tout court and that is just as misleading as the reified notions of the penal state which dominate some corners of criminology which could do well with a differentiated or more complex readings on the welfare state.