Introduction

We are happy to publish a roundtable debate based on the discussions carried out at the webinar organized by our journal to discuss Ayşe Buğra’s latest book, Social Policy in Capitalist History: Perspectives on Poverty, Work and Society. Buğra’s important contribution to the field of social policy is critically evaluated by Guy Standing, Andrew Fischer, and Tuba Ağartan. Social policy is an important field for New Perspectives on Turkey, one in which we try to publish research articles, book reviews, and commentaries. We are hoping that this roundtable debate, by revisiting the theoretical and historical foundations of social policy via Standing’s, Fischer’s, and Ağartan’s takes on Buğra’s arguments, will contribute to the enhancement of the ongoing critical discussions at a time during which the capitalist economy is going through a major transformation at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. We are grateful to Başak Akkan for organizing and moderating the webinar and seeing through the publication process and our associate editor Z. Umut Türem for making it possible.

Biray Kolluoğlu and Deniz Yükseker, NPT Editors

Buğra explores the debates on social assistance, labor market regulation, and social risk protection in different phases of capitalist history, highlighting the complexity of the conflicts and alliances shaping the politics of social policy. In its approach to the complex relationship between capitalism and social policy, the book explores how the dynamics of capitalist creative destruction (highlighted by Marx) have been met by “the self-protection of society” (Polanyi’s countermovement) through capitalist history. Throughout the book, Buğra addresses fundamental questions surrounding the politics of social policy. What holds people together and maintains social cohesion in modern societies divided along class lines? What is the position in society of those without income from property and capital? What are the implications of work, unemployment, and unemployability for those who earn their living in the labor market? The book traces the post-war social contract anchored in the institutional context of the Keynesian redistributive state and the principle of solidarity among equal citizens, envisioning a solidaristic society not dominated by market forces.

However, a shift to a neoliberal social contract has reshaped the politics of social policy to be adaptive (to markets) rather than transformative. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the inadequacy of the transformed social contract. A transpiring question in the book is: Can social policy be oriented to become a transformative force? Buğra also draws attention to the historical trajectory of capitalism and state–society relations in late industrializing countries, raising critical questions: What is the future of social policy in the global South in an era of rising inequalities? What role can we expect from international organizations like the International Labour Organization (ILO), United Nations (UN), and the World Bank in promoting an inclusive politics of social policy? Can they become the driving force behind transformative ideas for a new social contract? Yet the book acknowledges the challenges of the politics of the twenty-first century, considering the rise of authoritarianism and the surge of ultra-right-wing ideologies as countermovements shaping the politics of social policy into non-desirable forms. Against all odds, by providing an intellectual history of social policy from the sixteenth century to post-pandemic society, Buğra reminds us that progress in social policy could be found in the realm of ideas in an era marked by lack of alternatives to the “prevailing power of vested interests” in a capitalist order. The argument that labor is not a commodity and that social justice and social cohesion require protective political intervention forms an integral component of the history of social policy debate in the book and sheds light on future debates on social policy in times of uncertainty. I believe that our panel participants will address many of these issues.

Before we proceed to our roundtable, I would like to take a moment to introduce our participants. It is an immense joy to introduce our distinguished speakers. Please allow me to provide a brief selection of their biographies. Our first discussant, Tuba Ağartan, is a Professor of Health Sciences at Providence College in the USA. Her research interests lie at the interface of social policy and sociology with a focus on comparative health policy, professions and healthcare reform, and global health and governance. She is the co-editor of the journal Global Social Policy. Ağartan’s pioneering work on healthcare reform in Turkey has yielded significant insights into the welfare state transformation in the global South. Her recent book, Universal Health Coverage: Foundations and Horizons (Ağartan Reference Ağartan2025), owes its moral compass to Buğra’s scholarship and builds its conceptual framework and methodological approach in conversation with her work.

Andrew Fischer is a Professor of Inequality, Social Protection and Development at the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Fischer works extensively on poverty, inequality, social policy, and international development. He is the chair and co-editor of the journal Development and Change. His book Poverty as Ideology (Fischer Reference Fischer2018) received the International Studies in Poverty prize from the Comparative Research Program on Poverty in collaboration with Zed Books. Fischer’s work reminds us about the dark side of social policy, a critical stance particularly relevant in an era marked by rising authoritarianism.

Guy Standing is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. Standing is a founding member and honorary Co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network. Standing is a long-term advocate of universal basic income. He also served as the director of the Socio-Economic Security Program of the ILO. In Turkey Standing is widely recognized for his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, which has been translated into Turkish. Standing’s 2023 book The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty is in dialogue with Buğra’s book in many respects.

Ayşe Buğra is an Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Boğaziçi University. She co-founded the Social Policy Forum at Boğaziçi University, a research center that has provided a nurturing environment to social policy scholars. Buğra works extensively on comparative social policy, history of economics, international development, and business history. We are focusing on her latest book today. Prior to this work, her other important recent publication, co-authored with Osman Savaşkan, is The New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relationship between Politics, Religion and Business (Buğra and Savaşkan Reference Buğra and Savaşkan2014).

I think we all look forward to what will surely be a stimulating debate. So, without further ado, I would like to give the floor to Tuba to share her reflections.

And then there is, of course, the master stage where the master artist or master scholar is recognized as the culture bearer who is knowledgeable about the history of the chosen art form – or field or discipline in our case – and how they harvest and develop ideas, theories, and methodologies. They have their own style and create original pieces with such ease and quality that they are increasingly pushing the boundaries of their chosen medium. And they have designed and taught classes and workshops about their medium, and have written books and articles. So, this book reflects such mastery, where Professor Buğra shares her knowledge of the history of social policy, and explains its tools and methods to the next generations. Like woodworkers, scholars often make their own tools or develop the existing ones. So, she develops her own approach combining welfare-state literature and development studies. And reflecting her mastery, the book easily moves from engaging with rich literatures and their unresolved debates to critical questions on the future of welfare states in relation to the next stages of capitalism: “[Can] any human society … survive without taking measures to control and check the impact of capitalist development on people and society” (p. 5)? Buğra offers us a path to answer this question by combining social policy, development economics, and history, just like historian Fernand Braudel advises us to do. Braudel (Reference Braudel2009), in one of his seminal pieces, considers the impacts of the Annales School and argues that it has shaped the entire universe, not just history but also social sciences because of its mission to seek a language beyond the disciplinary boundaries. This book, in my opinion, represents such an endeavor.

The analogy of scholars as artisans is helpful also to explain how I reflect on Social Policy in Capitalist History and how I highlight its contributions. This is a good moment to explain my positionality, to explain how I approach this work, how I reflect and understand. I have been an apprentice in the Social Policy Forum, SPF as we call it, where I learned the craft from Professors Buğra and Keyder, the co-founders, and many others who visited and advised the Forum, and fellow researchers, some of whom are here at this event. I have studied health systems from a historical–sociological perspective that places our concerns with health, illness, and more recently wellness within social policy that constantly responds to capitalist transformations. I am not sure where I am on the apprenticeship process, but I will give you a very quick example of how masters guide. I think it was five to six years ago when I was bouncing ideas about my book with Professor Buğra. And she stated very clearly “you need to consider your main argument, your main contribution in terms of your values.” So, I started thinking deliberately about my values in relation to the specific theoretical argument, methodological approach, or findings from my field research. What are my moral standards for public health and health systems research? And how do I apply them? I am still seeking the answer but I did find my grounding in universalism. I am very grateful to her for showing me the path.

I would like to discuss a few points and conclude with my questions. I would like to frame this discussion in terms of the question “why should current and future scholars of social policy and development economics and public policy in general, and people who are interested in the future of humanity and the planet read this book?”

One reason, as I just mentioned, is to think about and find their moral compass. Why do we study social policy or development economics or public policy? Why do we do this work? What is the meaning of this job: is it alleviating the suffering that humans are perpetuating on each other and on the planet or is it stopping the erosion of trust towards each other? Or perhaps it is building and rebuilding institutions that are essential to protecting against risks and, as Titmuss would say, “a hundred- and-one other socially generated disservices” (Titmuss Reference Titmuss, Pierson and Castles2000, 46)?

The second reason is to learn about strategies to overcome the sectoral and methodological specialization that hinders theoretical progress in welfare state research. I have experienced the silos in my own research among health and other areas of social policy that lead apprentices to choose studying single-purpose areas. So, I think this is an issue of perspective and the kind of way we approach things and guide the next generations. Just recently, a colleague who works on global health issues in the global South shared that they never thought about the relevance of social policy in their areas of study. So, I do see silos. However, reflecting her endeavor to develop a language beyond disciplinary boundaries, Buğra skillfully moves across single policies and geographies: cash transfers, care policies, health insurance, social investment programs, active labor market policies, etc. in the global North and global South. She goes through these areas because they are connected and I think more of us should realize this and pay more attention in order to develop really sound arguments on how welfare systems work in different contexts and how they adapt to old and new pressures (demographic and epidemiological shifts, discourses on migration trends, highs and lows of populism–nationalism–globalism, climate crisis, digitalization, financialization, and transformations in historical capitalism, etc.) and political conflicts. In other words, Buğra provides a roadmap for us to study social policy in capitalist history.

Three, [we should read this book] to understand the value of historically grounded policy analysis, and I cannot emphasize this enough. In contrast to the tendency in Policy Studies to privilege crisis and sudden breaks, a historically grounded analysis can help us identify multiple time frames, where, as Braudel (Reference Braudel2009) would say, breaks do not destroy everything equally, and there is continuity. Relations develop, currents run deep, tides come and go. Each chapter in this book builds this analysis, and when it is read in its entirety, Social Policy in Capitalist History provides a very rich understanding of continuity and change.

The fourth reason to examine how the social contract has been transforming since World War II, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its social, economic, and political implications and all the other really drastic events that have been happening to make us question our belief in human rights, and especially about Marshall’s conception of social citizenship. So, we are at a point where a lot of things are very challenging and I would like to ask again “why do we do this, and what is the meaning of it all?” Clarifying our mission and the impact of our work could help us imagine new ways of thinking about the social contract and identify opportunities for communities, activists, and social movements in the midst of social, economic, and political turmoil.

As I transition to the questions, I would like to repeat the earlier point about encouraging masters to write more. As I read this book, I understood for the first time why Buğra is among the first scholars writing about social policy in Turkey. I do not think I have ever thought about that because as an apprentice it was natural in my environment. Indeed, her background in development economics and her earlier works on business–state relations, national developmentalism, and economic liberalism provide a natural foundation to her writings on social policy and allow us to recognize her unique lens. So, my first question reflects on this background. Given the silos among the different disciplines and areas of social policy, given the struggles of subdisciplines as described in Chapter 3, do you think the subdisciplines such as development economics and sociology of development, where I also place my work, have an important contribution to make to social policy in the twenty-first century? Do you have any thoughts about how to encourage the multidisciplinary approach already present in these subfields and contribute to social policy scholarship?

The second question builds on this question. Do you see the global South as a key actor in shaping the debates on social policy and reform, especially through their visions of a more egalitarian society, both on domestic and international fronts? Chapter 3 discusses social policy debates on inequality, poverty, and economic and social development in the newly independent countries from the 1960s to 1980s, revisiting Myrdal, Sen, and other development economists’ work. If we consider these ideas in relation to various forms of cooperation that we see among the countries – we can go as far back as the New International Economic Order and the Non-Aligned Movement or we can look at the post-colonial leaders like Nyerere, Manley, and their arguments for combining international demands with fight for equality at home, or we could look at more recent initiatives, regional collaboration initiatives such as the South–South Cooperation Networks and even the leadership that South Africa has been playing lately in geopolitical crisis situations – do you see unique or important contributions of these initiatives or voices from the global South in shaping current and future discourses and welfare policies?

My final question is about the current stage of capitalism. There is a rich account of politics of social policy in the book, describing how bourgeoisie was positioned against protective legislation, especially the debates on the crisis of the welfare state reflecting the skepticism about the compatibility of welfare state with capitalism. As we look closely into the new stages of capitalism, especially financialization trends since the 2000s, Buğra has a really interesting discussion on a different kind of neoliberal regulation and explains the changing role of social policy as “adaptive” and “not transformative.” If we look at the accumulation–legitimation dynamic, the new form of capitalism seems to be acknowledging the excesses of neoliberalism, such as the endless drive for financialization, growing inequality, the rise of right-wing populist leaders, and authoritarianism, but in a fashion that embraces private sector involvement in solving social problems. Buğra explains how we are witnessing the reversal of the previous movement from minima to optima (p. 146), but this does not seem to be identical to the previous version of residualism. Perhaps there are remnants of such residualism now, for example, in the programs that are designed to help those who are unable to adapt to flexible work environments or unable to use their entrepreneurial skills. But in the current discourse, residualism is strangely combined with the rhetoric on rights and universalism. We see these contradictory elements together in the current social policy agendas on health or social protection. So, is this what you mean by “adaptive” social policies? Would these policies in pensions, healthcare, labor markets, etc. limit the vagaries of neoliberal capitalism and protect society? In other words, is a universally available minimum “enough” to provide protection against poverty and insecurity, especially when markets are expanding and penetrating to more areas of human life and social services? The diffusion or penetration of financial capital is almost like getting into the capillary vessels of a system. They are everywhere: in pensions, hospitals, education, housing, employment agencies everywhere, mostly through financialization. So, a follow-up question is, “is it going to be embedding or re-embedding in our case if social policy is not limiting or checking market expansion, but supporting it?” That is how I would like to conclude my comments. And once again, I really appreciate this opportunity. It has been an honor.

I always remember one of your presentations at the Polanyi conference in Montreal where you presented how Hayek actually argued that liberal market society required moral foundations to function, and hence how his thinking was actually quite in harmony with a lot of the rising religious fundamentalism that we see in the USA and elsewhere. That message has always stuck with me. Also, in reading this book, there are a lot of nuggets that also really stand out in that way. For instance, one is the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville’s criticism of social assistance for the poor was not necessarily, as far as I understood, motivated by a Smithian or Burkean political economy critique of market interventions, but was actually more of a reaction against an idea of reciprocity being rooted in old aristocratic hierarchical relationships. I had not thought about it this way before and I found this very interesting. It is another insight that I will carry with me. As I wrote about in “The Dark Sides of Social Policy” (Fischer Reference Fischer2020), it forces us to also think about the dark sides of something like reciprocity as well: when we talk about reciprocity, what types of reciprocity, and with whom, and are those embedded within egalitarian or hierarchical relationships?

Also, the fact that Thomas Paine was writing about cash transfers in the late eighteenth century was interesting as well. I had not made that connection. And so, when people talk about cash transfers being a revolution from the South, they actually appear to be a revolution from the European Enlightenment. And of course, as always, you demonstrate very effectively one of Polanyi’s core arguments, which is the fact that this double movement – the impulse for social protection, so to speak – is coming from all quarters of society, including reactionary and conservative forces, and how they have all been actors in the advancement of social policy over these centuries, which is also a really important point.

In preparing my comments, I decided to focus on a point that is a personal interest of mine, and again is an idea of yours that has inspired a lot of my thinking and that I have carried with me in my work. This is the idea of the fundamentally different sequencing between social assistance and social security during early capitalism in Europe versus the sequencing in developing countries in the twentieth century. You do not discuss it too much in the book, although it does come up, so it gives me the excuse to talk about it. In Chapter 3, you detail how social assistance developed gradually, from discussions around social assistance and work and “the social problem” into the development of more formal social policy or social security provisioning much later. Modern social security perhaps started with Germany and then more European countries in the twentieth century as they started to develop the formal structures that we now call the welfare state, which were very much instituted. That is different from most developing countries because, as you argue, they actually went through the opposite process. There was not much development of social assistance and then, especially in the post-colonial period, there was an importation of the welfare state model that was, as you say, perhaps necessary for development, industrialization, and so on, but that created a more polarized, bifurcated type of social policy setting. Then social assistance develops afterwards, more recently, and hence there is the emergence of the missing middle that we often talk about. The ILO has often talked about the missing middle, for instance. I am sure Guy has talked a lot about the missing middle.

I find a lot of parallels in this argument with the thinking of Celso Furtado, the Brazilian development economist, in his discussion of industrialization. I wrote this in my article on “The Dark Sides of Social Policy” (Fischer Reference Fischer2020), in referring to your work as one of the contributors of that forum issue, that Furtado makes a similar argument about how there is a flip in the sequencing of industrialization. In the leading first industrializers, production leads consumption. You do not consume industrial output until you produce it. However, for all the late industrializers, particularly the late late industrializers, as Albert Hirschman referred to them, consumption leads production. Developing countries essentially access what Furtado called “industrial civilization” through imports, in the sense that you can consume all the industrial goods up to the technological frontier without producing them, and then to industrialize, countries basically substitute that consumption with their production. That creates a fundamentally different structuring of economies and different dynamics of inequality and polarization, such as with the difficulties of the industrial sector or the formal sector to absorb what might be called surplus labor and hence the prevalence of informality. This creates fundamentally different types of social policy struggles and is very much related, I think, to the way the “social problem,” as you call it, is then articulated in these peripheral capitalist settings. That connection between the inverted sequencing of social policy that you discuss, and the similar inversion of industrialization that Furtado highlights, is very interesting.

Of course, a key distinction is that industrial policy is very different from social policy. Thandika Mkandawire used to like to point out the irony that neoliberals argue against targeting in industrial policy, but they argue for targeting in social policy. If they are against targeting, this should be against targeting across the board. And yet the actual logic of industrial policy would be more disposed for targeting, because it necessarily focuses on specific industries, sectors, and firms, and the logic of social policy is more disposed for universalism, given the universal nature of the human needs that it addresses. He wrote that argument in his work on universalism. Some of these ideas also appear in the work of Alexander Gerschenkron as well, in his discussion about the experiences of late industrialization and that, parallel to the very active use of industrial policy, late industrializers moved towards universalistic forms of social policy as a very important part of their late industrialization strategies. And the later they were, the more important this universalism in social policy became. So, among the successful late industrializers, we see ever more proactive moves into universalism the later they were.

The neoliberal response would probably be to make a distinction between public and private spheres, in the sense that they would say that industrial policy is largely conducted by private actors whereas social assistance is public, hence there is a different logic that applies to both. You discussed a lot of this in your book very effectively. But it does raise the issue – and this relates to Tuba’s comments as well – of whether there is an increasing imperative for universalism in developing countries, the more we advance to later and later stages of industrialization, even though this has been more and more difficult to attain. There is this fundamental tension or dialectic that developing countries are facing in the evolution of social policy – logically development would demand more universalism and yet the ability to achieve this has been undermined massively over the last four decades. May I ask you for your thoughts on this?

In addition, just to push the argument further to see what you would say about it, when we think of industrialization, it is very clear that there is a before and after with industrial production. Late industrializers started with no industrial production and then they accessed it, they started to produce it. However, this is not actually the same in the case of social policy and social assistance. In this sense, you go into extensive detail in your book on the evolution of social assistance in the European context, but you actually say very little about the historical context of social assistance (or its functional equivalents) outside of the European context. For instance, on the pre-colonial or colonial legacies of social policy in different regions of the world, there are probably some fascinating insights from the Ottoman Empire. Were there similar types of discussions and debates about what we would call the “social problem” under the Ottoman or under Islamic law? In a fascinating book by Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (1992), she analyzes the detailed discussions in Islamic law going back several centuries that engage with a lot of the issues that you dealt with in your book, about the role of gender and work, on issues of poverty, working conditions, and so on. These are very similar social problems that you highlight as the origins of social assistance in the early modern European context. Similar types of discussions around the “social problem” can probably be found in the Mughal Empire in India, or in Imperial China (or what we call China today), such as during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Also, discussions might have been around the changing roles of reciprocal obligations – the roles of reciprocal obligations in the more traditional systems in each of these contexts, if and how these roles were breaking down, and if and how concerns about this were then brought into the public policy of various states in different parts of the world.

Also, regarding the immediate post-colonial era, you cite both Ha Joon Chang and myself on the idea that even a lot of early post-war decolonized countries might not have been practicing social assistance in name, but they were nonetheless practicing various policies that were serving the same functions. Thandika Mkandawire again makes this point with regard to subsidies, especially farming subsidies, that they played a social assistance role in Africa that was much more adapted to the rural agrarian context than current-day cash transfers. And of course, the successful late industrializers massively pushed in education and health provisioning well before they started to take off industrially. The early post-war focus of development economics was also very much on employment, and as such was quite similar to your conceptualization of the “social problem” as concerning both poverty and work. Hence, there are all sorts of legacies and continuities, making it difficult to suggest that assistance to the poor was entirely absent from policy, even though perhaps it was conceptualized differently, not explicitly as social assistance.

In this sense, perhaps Furtado’s inversion with respect to industrialization does not work so well in the realm of social policy. Rather, it is more a case that these similarly emerging considerations of poverty and work, and social provisioning more generally – that could well have emerged from indigenously evolving forms of social assistance and reciprocity (which is a counterfactual that we cannot prove) – were disrupted by colonialism (in the case of South and Southeast Asia and Africa), or by the end of empire in China and subsequent civil war, or else they were distorted by the highly unequal post-colonial social structures in Latin America. To what degree do we need to bring into the analysis consideration of colonialism and also the counterfactuals of these aborted indigenous or vernacular practices of social policy that would have had their own logical trajectory had they not been displaced, suppressed, or distorted by colonialism?

The role of colonialism does not have much space in your book, both with respect to how colonialism influenced the emergence of modern social policy in Europe and elsewhere, and also how many European thinkers were also responding to colonialism. You discuss it somewhat in the sections on how they imagined the utopias in other parts of the world and used these imaginaries as critiques of European society. But what were the actual political economy relationships with the colonies, and how did these shape social policy in both the colonial and the colonized countries, influencing, distorting, or aborting indigenous forms of social assistance development in the latter? Is there not a need to bring in colonialism much more centrally into the discussion about social policy and capitalism in the peripheries? And if you would bring it into the discussion, how would you do this?

One response to this question might be to highlight, as you emphasized in the second chapter of your book, the already advanced degree of socio-economic transformation that was apparent in Western Europe and especially the UK as early as the seventeenth century. One theme that comes out strongly in your book is this emphasis of how the transition from the more reciprocal traditional relationships that constituted social protection before the early modern period to social protection becoming an object of public policy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is related to the nature of this structural transformation in Europe at the time, especially labor moving out of agriculture. For instance, as you cite in your book, the share of employment working outside agriculture was already around 50 percent in England by 1600, which is quite incredible when you think about it.

Hence, to what degree would you ground your analysis of the different sequencings of social assistance versus social security on these types of fundamental structural characteristics? To what degree has the evolution of social assistance in developing countries been predicated on significant shifts away from agricultural employment, which have been relatively recent in many of these countries (as you discuss in the fourth chapter), and from the traditional social relations that characterized such forms of employment? Is it fundamentally this structure shift, and the breakdown in traditional social relations that it induces, that then stimulates the need for bringing the social problem to the fore in public policy? Is that the way you would analyze it, or is that veering a bit too much into a form of modernization theory? Or is there something else going on?

I am just throwing these questions out to you so that we can hear more of your wisdom as you reflect on them. Thank you.

With regard to Ayşe’s work, I take a parallel approach to the issues rather than a contradictory one. So, what I am going to do in my comments is relate your subject matter to my latest book, which is The Politics of Time (Standing Reference Standing2023). Basically, it goes back to the ancient Greeks in an attempt to rescue the concepts of work. Essentially the ancient Greeks made a sharp distinction between labor, which was done by the metics, the slaves, and the banausoi, for exchange value, and work, which was done for use value. You can interpret the social struggles that have taken place through the evolution of capitalism as a constant struggle by the working classes to restore or retain a right to work against the imposition of a duty to labor. I think that particular dialectic is left out of your narrative. You keep referring to the world of work, when actually I believe you are referring to the world of labor.

The Greeks also made a distinction between recreation, which was to keep the body and the mind fit for labor and work, and leisure, captured by the word scholē, which was a combination of time in public education and time in participation in the life of the polis. The citizen was expected to want to maximize his time (it was a sexist society) in scholē and spend enough time on recreation and work. Work was done with relatives and friends in the community to strengthen philia – civic friendship.

If you look at the struggles you also see a very important use of time which the Greeks mentioned, but it was developed more as the evolution of capitalism took place, which was commoning, shared work and leisure in the commons involving common property and what Ostrom was to call “common pool resources.”

In that context, the most foundational document of democracy, sealed alongside the Magna Carta in November 1217, was the Charter of the Forest. The Charter of the Forest is more subversive than the Communist Manifesto or the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. What it said was that the common man, everybody, had a right to subsistence. It was a universalistic assertion, the right of subsistence, a right to access the means of production, a right to work, and a right to common, all against a duty to labor. It was a remarkable document.

If you look through British history – and British capitalist history is an important core theme in your book, Ayşe – you will see that all the great rebellions, including the Peasants’ Revolt, Kett’s Rebellion, the Chartists, and the movement around William Morris, have always been about trying to resist the capitalist juggernaut, forcing people to do labor instead of work and commoning, trying to enable people to spend more time doing work, in the enriching cultural creative sense, while also regaining leisure, real leisure.

A key figure in the narrative of the development of industrial capitalism was Thorstein Veblen with his book of 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class. By then, leisure had been converted to consumption and particularly the vicarious consumption by wives of the bourgeoisie. Leisure had lost its radical connotation. And I believe the greatest error of modernity in politics and in social sciences was the universalization of labor by the end of the nineteenth century.

So, despite all the rebellions against labor, the political resistance to capitalism was suddenly about the alienated “right” to labor, the “right” to have jobs, the “right” to be in a position of subordination. So, we had universalization of labor promoted by the communists and by the social democrats. There was suddenly laborism. It was the triumph of what Marx had called “alienated activity.” Polanyi understood this, because he had seen capitalism in the nineteenth century as the disembedded phase, in which finance assumed increasing power. I think the key is that as finance increases its power, as the rhetoric of the dominant interests push for free markets, laissez faire, as in his terms, there is an increase in inequalities, there is an increase in insecurity, and there is a diminishing capacity of people to do work, rather than enforced impoverishing labor. So, Marx was 100 percent right when he said in 1850 that to talk about the right to work under capitalism is “an absurdity,” his actual words.

I think it is an important aspect of Polanyi that he saw this disembedded phase of what he depicted as the Great Transformation as producing more and more insecurity and more and more inequalities. Not enough attention, in my view, is given to the insecurities aspect of that narrative. Anyhow, the disembedded phase reached a crisis in the 1930s, when there was, in his words, “a threat of the annihilation of civilization,” a crunch point, when either the system could shift to the right or it could shift to a new form of left. And of course, by the right he meant fascism or bolshevism.

Then, after World War II, we had the re-embedded phase of the Great Transformation, when briefly the economic system was brought under control by society. The re-embedded phase was a period of fictitious labor decommodification. I do not believe that labor is a fictitious commodity. To me that does not make sense. We need to recall the distinction between labor and labor power. Marx made this distinction and Polanyi did, but they both muddled the terms. I quote different passages where they say different things, but labor was an activity. Labor is something you supply. It is subject to demand and supply. It has a price. That is the primary definition of a commodity. There is nothing fictitious about it. By contrast, labor power is the capacity of people, their multiple capacities as human beings. It is what we possess in ourselves, and perhaps should be called work power or human power.

And Marx was right to say that labor is alienated activity, but it was still a commodity. What happened in the post-1945 Beveridge–Bismarck welfare-state era was a fictitious labor decommodification, because more and more of the payment to labor came in non-wage forms. Increasingly, workers obtained non-wage benefits – paid holidays, paid medical leave, paid pensions, various state benefits, etc. – so that the money wage became a smaller and smaller proportion of the total payment for labor. But, of course, you had to do labor if you wanted to receive those benefits. And it was not a universal system, it was a labor-based system for so-called breadwinners, for those docilely performing obedient full-time stable labor.

I noticed that the term breadwinner does not figure in the index of your book. However, it was the breadwinner era, or what I call the industrial time era. During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Taylorism and Fordism were taken forward in various ways, as discussed in my books, but throughout it was non-universalistic. For instance, and most importantly, it treated women as secondary, as non-citizens in not having a full range of social and economic rights.

The advance of social rights, which T. H. Marshall thought the twentieth century was all about, was only for those who were in stable, full-time labor. The rest got the drippings. However, this laborist model broke down in the 1970s, for reasons that you and I agree on. The fact is that it broke down. Then we had the political triumph of the Mont Pelerin Society and the neoliberal era led by Friedrich Hayek, Polanyi’s old rival, and Milton Friedman and in political terms by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which dismantled the remnants of that old laborist welfare system.

This was a new disembedded phase. And they moved to a point where there is a new crisis, which social democrats have failed to arrest. Although you have not discussed it, but the Third Way reaction by the left, by the social democrats in the 1990s, was basically to accept neoliberal economics but add on an appendage of “poverty relief.” So, for instance in Britain we had Gordon Brown, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer, that is the finance minister, and then Prime Minister and his main approach was to continue financial liberalization. He freed the Bank of England, abandoning democratic control of monetary policy. He boosted means-testing, behavior-testing, and workfare came in. Similar changes took place in other countries, including the USA. This was a system where the establishment left accepted rising inequalities, but they wanted to eradicate child poverty.

This is a fundamental shift by social democrats, and that is why it is correct to say what Beppe Grillo said, that they are “dead men walking.” Meanwhile, the neoliberal revolution changed capitalism. It changed it by ushering in what I have called rentier capitalism, in which more and more of the income, wealth, and power go to the owners of property. The right has used the rhetoric of the free market, but today there is the most unfree market economy ever created in history. But to talk about market domination is actually not correct. It is institutional domination in the interests of finance and all property owners, most of all, intellectual property owners.

So, the patent system under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of 1994 has extended the US globally intellectual property rights system. We do not have a free market. We have a system in which if you have an idea, you can get a patent which gives you a monopoly profit for twenty years, maybe forty years. During that time nobody can compete with you. That is not a free market. Plus, there is complete domination by finance, which has turned firms into commodities. Today, firms themselves are commodities. And many are bought by plutocratic corporations simply for their intellectual property. So, there is a new form of capitalism and, with that, a new class structure that I have been discussing in my books has evolved.

Reading your couple of references to my book, The Precariat (Standing Reference Standing2011), I was left wondering whether you agree with my characterization or think that the precariat is a condition. I have argued that the precariat is the new mass class. And a class in Marxian terms – and I think Polanyi would have agreed with this – is defined in three dimensions. This is a key point I want to make for the discourse.

The first dimension of any class is distinctive relations of production. The precariat today is being habituated to a life of unstable, insecure labor, living without an occupational identity. It has to do a lot of work for labor and work for the state, none of which is recognized as work, or remunerated. Increasingly, the precariat is exploited off workplaces and outside labor time. This is a fundamentally different form of injection into the capitalist system, whereas the old proletariat was mostly exploited on the workplace in labor time. The precariat is exploited off the workplace almost as much as on the workplace and outside labor time almost as much as in labor time.

The second dimension is distinctive “relations of distribution.” The interesting starting point here is that the other classes that I discussed – the plutocracy, the elite, and the salariat – are obtaining more and more of their income from forms of rent. Many in the plutocracy and the elite get all their income from forms of rent. By contrast, the precariat is exploited not just through the wage system but also through forms of rent, most notably through debt. It only has money wages. It does not obtain any of the non-wage forms of benefit gained by the salariat and proletariat. So, it is distinctive, whereas the proletariat, from its inception in the 1830s onwards, received more and more of its income in non-wage forms. Debt is a systematic issue in rentier capitalism.

The third dimension of the precariat is the most important: its relations to the existing state. This is the first mass class in history that is systematically losing the rights of citizenship. They are losing social rights, les droits acquis, they are losing cultural rights, and they are losing economic rights. They cannot practice what they are wanting to do and capable of doing. The loss of rights is fundamentally different from the old proletariat. They are also losing political rights, because they do not see in the political spectrum any political movement that is representing their interests.

However, the precariat has been a class-in-the-making in the past three decades, not yet a class-for-itself. In the Marxian sense, what this means is that it knows what it is against. It is against the insecurities, it is against the debt, it is against exploitation, etc. But it is not united in what it wants instead.

As such, the precariat is split into three factions. So, you have the Atavists, feeling they have lost the Past and want it back. They are listening to the populist sirens, including your own President, including Donald Trump, including the usual suspects Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni, and so on. You can name those people who are promising to bring back yesterday. In their populist rhetoric Yesterday is better than Today. Vote for the past. That is basically what they are saying.

Second, there are the Nostalgics, the migrants who do not have any rights, but they do not have any sense of Present. They do not have a Now, a secure sense of home and embeddedness. But for the most part they keep their heads down. They will not vote for the far right.

Third, there are the Progressives, the part of the precariat who have education and want a Future.

When I came to Istanbul in November last year, to present my book which had just come out in Turkish, I noticed that I was speaking to this third part of the precariat, as is the case almost everywhere. It consists of the young who go to university or college and were promised a Future. But they come out without a future. They come out with debt and with a sense of foreboding, and they are looking for a new politics of paradise. In your terms, they are looking for a new social policy, one that could be emancipatory. That is why we are finding that we are getting support for basic income all over the world now. We have had huge experiments in India, in Africa and Latin America, and now in the USA and Canada, in Britain, and in Finland. We have over 200 experiments going on, with considerable success.

The Progressives are the great hope against the march of fascism. The young benefit from not having the false consciousness of laborism. Intuitively, they understand that universalism must be linked to nature, linked to the revival of scholē. When talking about those themes, they are looking forward, and they are looking to dismantle rentier capitalism.

Now, what I have been trying to say is a parallel narrative rather than a contradictory one with what you have argued. I think the combination makes a powerful case for saying that students should be exposed to a historical analysis of the evolution of social policy as an integral part of the evolution of capitalism.

So, I want to end with a teasing question, if I may. The teasing question is this. It is a two-part question. First, Ayşe, are you a social democrat? That is one question. Second, do you adhere to Polanyian dialectics? In his best form, that means capitalism evolving through a series of disembedded and re-embedded phases. The trouble is that his book has a teleological narrative. His Great Transformation has an end point, in welfare capitalism. He wrote it in 1943 (published in 1944). So, he was only ushering in that period. But definitely when you read the book you feel that for him that is the end point. It is a teleological story and I do not believe capitalism is a teleological story. I think the dialectics of capitalism will continue for as long as capitalism continues.

So, I asked those two questions and a final one, which is even more of a tease. Do you think work is the same as labor?

Thank you very much for the book. Thank you for your friendship. I think we should have a physical discussion of this, preferably in İstanbul. And I agree with Andrew, that a good restaurant would be a good place to start. Thank you very much.

Thinking about what Tuba said about the “silos,” let me say first that beyond the question of compartmentalization, we have to see that people are interested in social policy issues for different reasons and so they work in different areas in different ways. There are some people who are attracted by the technicality of the field. The measurements, statistical analysis, and feasibility studies; all those are very attractive to some people. Some people are interested in economics of social policy while others find the ethical dimension of policy problems interesting. My own interest in the field is very closely related to my interest in capitalism. As I have discovered, not in the beginning of my studies on social policy but through time, social policy is a very good field of study for understanding the nature of capitalism. After that, my whole work on social policy has evolved with a conversation I imagined between Marx and Polanyi at the background. Of course, I find Marx’s understanding of capitalism, his insistence on the amazingly dynamic character of capitalism, very inspiring. Marx knows what capitalism is about. But then there is Polanyi, who perhaps knows better what the society is about. Hence, the conversation I imagine. I think that Marx was fascinated by the creative dynamics of capitalism while Polanyi was asking the question “can a society survive with this kind of creative destruction?” So, this is what is at the background of this book on the history of social policy and politics of social policy.

I also find it very interesting that there are some perennial questions which are continuously asked in different formulations in the history of social policy debate. I cannot deal with it very systematically now, but I think Guy’s point about work and labor could be considered in this light. In the sixteenth century, you find Thomas More talking about a short working day so that all people would have time for leisure to develop their mental and creative potential. The same thing gets repeated in Marx in the nineteenth century, and then it gets repeated in Alfred Marshall, among all people, calling for a six-hour working day. These kinds of repeated themes are found in social policy all the time. You read something written in the twenty-first century and you say, “I remember this from somewhere,” and you go to a sixteenth-century or eighteenth-century text and find the same argument in different words. I find this fascinating because it is about the way capitalism evolves in different ways while similar questions emerge in totally different contexts.

To answer Andrew’s question about sequencing, I have to clarify what I am talking about when I talk about social policy. What I am talking about is “modern” social policy, which involves the use of public funds by secular authorities to deal with problems of capitalist societies. I think that the origins of this modern social policy can be traced back to sixteenth-century Europe and I see Juan Luis Vives’s On Assistance to the Poor written in 1526 as the first modern social policy text; it is at least the earliest text that I know. Was there not social policy before? In societies without the commercialization of agriculture and the rise of free labor in the Marxian sense, people could find protection against what we now call “social risks” in traditional relations of reciprocity. I do not think this is the same as social policy that we now discuss which I think emerges, as Asa Briggs (Reference Briggs1961) explains very well in his article “The welfare state in historical perspective,” in societies that have markets taking an important part in the economy. I am not just talking about markets for exports or localized markets; I am talking about markets playing an important role in different domains of the economy at large and changing the nature of socio-economic relations between people. Before that, we do not really find social policy in the same sense as in societies affected by the development of capitalism and the expansion of markets.

The different sequencing of social policy developments in the South is somewhat related to this point. In Poverty: A History, Geremek (Reference Geremek1994) writes about “a new poverty” in his discussion of sixteenth-century Europe. Poverty exists everywhere, all the time, but it has emerged in a new form in sixteenth-century Europe with the emerging capitalist order. When I reread Geremek, I said “that is what I see now in Turkey, this is a new kind of poverty what we have now.” It is at that time I started thinking about the sequencing. Did we not have social policy in Turkey before? Yes, we had a Bismarckian, inegalitarian corporatist social security system, which was established because there was a modern sector. But many people were in the agricultural sector where small peasant production continued. In the cities, too, there was a large working population outside the modern sector; for these people what was important was the protection they found in informal relations of solidarity. But then, with neoliberal globalization, with the commercialization of agriculture, with privatization, and with the structural changes leading to an immense commodification of labor, a new type of social policy measures was needed. It was at that point, not before, that social assistance to the poor became an important policy issue because poverty could no longer be controlled by the old forms of informal solidarity.

About social policy in other forms, yes, we had it, like you write, like Ha-Joon Chang discusses. Agricultural subsidies, for example, served some social purpose. We also had irregular housing, irregular settlements in urban public land which were accepted as a substitute for a formal social housing policy. But social policy has begun to take shape in a way similar to the developments in advanced capitalist countries in the age of neoliberal globalization when the language of social policy, too, was globalized. That is quite new.

And Tuba, yes, a dialogue between development economists, people working on the global South and people working on social policy everywhere is extremely important at this stage. We cannot have another welfare state experience which is isolated in the “Fortress Europe.” That can hardly work, so we have to talk. I came to the field of social policy from development economics and, as Andrew mentioned, there are a lot of useful insights which should not be forgotten in the history of development economics. And development economists, too, have to talk with people in social policy.

Andrew and I studied development economics with Kari Polanyi Levitt. What we learned from the pioneers of development economics was very inspiring for me. But there was not much dialogue, perhaps there was not any dialogue, between these pioneers of development economics and the pioneers of the welfare state theory; they were contemporaries and they did not talk. And it is frustrating, is it not? You would want Dudley Seers to talk to T. H. Marshall. That would have been productive. It did not happen. When I was a student, people thought that social policy was irrelevant in developing country contexts. If you think of Polanyi’s contribution, his ideas on embeddedness and disembeddedness for example, you could think that social policy can be universalistic, can be emancipatory only in a context where the economy is embedded in society; but, at the same time, it is also true that social policy could contribute to the re-embedding of the economy.

People consider social policy as an area where you have to provide funds, you have to increase social expenditures in order to have good social services, education, health, etc. That is true, but at the same time social policy is an area where it is possible to create decent work in health, in education, and in social care. Guy would perhaps say that this is all about labor opportunities, but there are endless discussions about decent work and decent work can be created in these areas. This could be considered if one stops thinking of development only in terms of the position of the country in global commodity chains. One could also think of agriculture in different terms when one thinks about the meaning of food dependency and the kind of disasters it can produce in times of crisis. Again, we can think of employment opportunities in agriculture which change society, which are transformative in many ways. When we think along these lines, we see better why the dialogue between social policy and development studies would be meaningful.

Now about work. It is interesting that the shortening of the workday has been discussed since the early origins of the social policy debate. But I also remember E. P. Thompson’s great 1967 article “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.” There he writes about how workers fought against factory discipline, which was so difficult to accept, so degrading for former independent artisans. He also writes that workers won the struggle for the shorter workday, then they won the struggles for paid holidays, part-time and overtime pay, etc. Those were working-class victories and there is now more leisure. But E. P. Thompson ends the article with a question: “How will this leisure time be used in a modern society?”

This problem of the use of leisure time, when you think about it, is closely related to the question of participation in society, which I think is a central question in social policy. I think the field of social policy is, first and foremost, about participation in society, about “membership.” In fact, I wanted to have the term “membership” in the title of my book, but the publisher said that it was difficult to understand, so we put “society” instead. What kind of alternative do you have, Guy, to participating in society through meaningful work? Can the voluntary sector solve that problem today? I always think of that when I read you and I read you quite often. I mean, what do people do when they do not work? This is a genuine question.

The workplace is a place of socializing, and not having it can be an individual and also political problem. I am really impressed by your scenario of the “politics of inferno” because it is so much with us now and you wrote about it when it was not so present in our lives. Now, it is in front of us. And how do you avoid that politics of inferno? I agree with you that not all precariat is dangerous, that they do not share a common experience. There are some who are not drawn to demagogues and populist politicians, but how do you appeal to them as a whole so that they have some hope and they do not follow these politicians? I do not know the answer. But maybe you noticed that I finished the book by writing about progress.

Inegalitarian ideas have always been present in social policy debate. But read, for example, Edmund Burke’s very disturbing ideas in his Reflections on Scarcity (Burke Reference Burke1800). Inegalitarian ideas also exist today, but they are now defended and expressed much less freely, it is not so easy to say that inequality has to be accepted no matter how it affects people’s lives. I think this could be seen as progress.

I think progress could be found in the ideas, but there are also things that we do not know. The question of integrating people into society without decent work for pay (or labor) is one of those problems to which I have no answer. We can have answers to many questions, we might find the solutions to many problems, even health, Tuba, although that is not easy. But the question of work is very difficult; I do not know the answer to that.

Guy, you also asked me a Polanyi question. I do not think that he thought that welfare capitalism was the end. He did not seem to be sure about the future. You see, “Freedom in a complex society,” the last chapter of The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944), is open-ended. It is very open-ended, I think. I do not think that his story is teleological. Anyway, I am not interested in Polanyi for his ideas on the history of capitalism. It is his understanding of society that I find important. And I find his idea of the countermovement and what he writes on the different political expressions of the countermovement very useful to understand contemporary global politics. The countermovement does not have to be progressive, does not have to be egalitarian, and there can very well be a fascist response to market expansion. I think what Andrew writes about “the dark side of social policy” is in line with Polanyi’s analysis which is very relevant for this day and age, really. But I think Polanyi exaggerated the exceptionality of the nineteenth century somehow. I do not know what you think about it, but I do not find the nineteenth century that exceptional. In the nineteenth century, markets expanded and people reacted with progressives and reactionaries, conservatives and liberals taking part in society’s reaction to the disruptions caused by market expansion. But when you look at the history of social policy debate, you find similar reactions, attempts to check the expansion of the market also in other historical contexts; you find it already in the sixteenth century. So, I disagree with Polanyi’s emphasis of exceptionality, but I find his insight on the relationship between markets and societies very useful.