Social interpretations of European history have taken a beating over the last decade. The French Revolution in particular has been the scene of a historiographical battle over the usefulness of accounts that tie ideology and political aim to particular classes, as though they grow necessarily from such social soil. Reactionary aristocrats, rising bourgeois, incipiently proletarian sansculottes, all have been driven from the stage as historical actors. Part of the same class-based reading of modern European history, the social interpretation of the welfare state must also answer for similar methodological shortcomings. Observers commonly draw a direct link between workers, their disadvantaged position in the social hierarchy and their interest in solidaristic welfare policy. Redistribution was a demand made from the bottom up. Those who especially suffered risk and misfortune were the most obvious forces behind ambitions for solidaristic reform. The industrial proletariat was this group.

Such logic, underpinning the social interpretation, rests on an elision between two sorts of groups: social class and risk category. Redistributive winners naturally favor solidarity, a helping hand from the fortunate; losers, conversely, resist. Whether these categories, determined by social insurance's actuarial zero-sum calculus of risk redistribution, always intersect consistently with particular social classes, as framed by quite different and vastly more nebulous factors, is another question.