Social Needs, Risks, and Disruptions in Permanently Modernizing Capitalist Nations

The history of the welfare state and its reform is a history of political actors struggling to cope with social needs, risks, and disruptions caused by rapid social and economic development. Paying attention to the “objective” problem pressure to which political actors respond is crucial for explaining past and contemporary welfare state reform. History may never repeat itself, but in many ways and irrespective of regime form or level of development, the problems of societal disruption, social needs, and risks that tend to emerge in the wake of what we conveniently call “modernization,” as well as the social and political struggles to deal with them, are strikingly similar across time and space (Wilensky and Lebeaux 1965 [1958]; Flora and Alber 1981; Flora and Heidenheimer 1981b). Take as an illustration the following quotation from a recent study of social policy in China and read it while keeping 19th-century Britain or Germany in mind:

The social needs, risks, and injustice described are not identical with but are still very similar to what we see described in, say, Marx’s analysis of the struggle over the working day in DasKapital (1867, chapter 10), in Engels’s examination of the suffering of the working class in Victorian England in DieLage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1844), or, much later, in Polanyi’s study of the impact and the reaction to the social dislocation caused by the unrestrained capitalist free market in The Great Transformation (1944).