To discuss in equal detail, in a book about social solidarity as it has been expressed through welfare policy, five countries across the century from Bismarck to Thatcher, from the constitutional to the oil crisis, would strain the intellectual Sitzfleisch of even the most patient reader. Mercifully, such sacrifices are unnecessary. Scandinavia is significant to the extent that the social interpretation rests heavily, however mistakenly, on its experiences. The early histories of other nations do not enjoy this cachet. Not until the great wave of reform after the Second World War did the pursuit of explicitly solidaristic policies affect welfare reform in Britain, Germany and France. Whereas nineteenth-century Scandinavia merits examination for the origins of such an approach, little is won for this subject by dwelling on the prewar period elsewhere. The tenor of social policy was decided in early legislative initiatives, and most later reforms up until mid-century were codifications, in some cases expansions and elaborations of these, but rarely forays in fundamentally new directions.

One major new development concerned unemployment, which was now treated as an insurable risk, first in Great Britain and later in Germany. Although an important evolution of social policy, unemployment sheds little light on the themes of this book.