The welfare state and sociology grew up in tandem. The cornerstones of the modern welfare state were erected in the late nineteenth century, first in Germany and soon thereafter across most of Western Europe. This was during the same era in which sociology, as an academic discipline, was founded. Such coincidence is hardly accidental. Both evolved out of prevailing controversies on how to address the ‘social question’ how to ensure order and consensus in an increasingly individualized, atomized, and seemingly polarizing society; how to respond to the commodification of both needs and labor; and how to manage the changing balance of political power that, predictably, would result from democratization.

The Western welfare states did not evolve uniformly as industrialization and democratization unfolded. Indeed, the beginnings of modern social policy appear to belie any connection at all. The pioneers were autocratic Germany and Austria, and the laggards par excellence were the democratic and industrial leaders, such as the United States and Great Britain (Rimlinger, 1971). Furthermore, today's prototypical examples of highly advanced welfare states – the Scandinavian – would, until the 1930s, have appeared comparatively undeveloped. This apparent paradox has stimulated an especially long-standing and intense sociological debate over welfare state development. Certainly, an explanation of the social origins of a phenomenon may not be a good guide to later development. Nonetheless, the very fact that nations, one after the other, eventually converge in adopting and expanding social policies suggests that, yes, there exist common underlying causal forces behind the modern welfare state.

Quite unexpectedly and tragically, our coeditor, Robert Alford, died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2003, at the age of 74. We would like to tell you a little bit about him. Bob grew up near the Sierras in California where his parents had a ranch in Avery near Angels Camp, of jumping-frog-contest fame. Bob was well over six feet tall and he loved to walk in the forest, orchards, and mountains. He graduated from Bret Harte High School in the gold country of Northern California and attended the University of California at Berkeley in 1946. He was president of Stiles' Hall and active in the campus YMCA and the Labor Youth League. He regularly played classical piano in the Berkeley Chamber Music Group and loved folk music. Bob began work on an MA in sociology at California during the days of the controversial Loyalty Oath and left the university in 1951 rather than sign.

In 1952, Bob started working at the International Harvester truck plant in Emeryville, California. Bob Blauner, who was a coworker, describes their first meeting. “He was wearing goggles to protect his eyes and a gray apron or smock over his work clothes to collect the metallic dust coming from the machine he was operating” that made fenders for diesel trucks. Bob served as a shop steward and, with Blauner and others, pushed the UAW further to the left than it might otherwise have gone.

A broadly pluralist tradition of political sociology flourishes today in its neopluralist reconstructions in political science and, to a lesser extent, sociology. Since the 1970s the pluralist tradition of political analysis, which stressed the causal primacy of a plurality of collective social actors, has passed into a neopluralist phase. This transition entailed an extension of the pluralist repertoire of actors into the once-forbidden territory of Marxian class and antiestablishment social movements, as well as an enhanced recognition of the grounding and embeddedness of politically influential actors in social structures and systemic dynamics beyond those of culture. Neopluralism expands the pluralist stress on multiple bases of social action to encompass a yet fuller range of actors (class ones in particular), an increased sensitivity to structural and systemic modes of power not reducible to social action, and a more complex articulation of agency and structure. Insofar as frameworks and theories of political analysis today reflect both this ecumenical approach to the varieties of potentially important actors (for example, union movements as well as business lobbies and interest associations) and the approach's openness to the causal powers of both agency and structure (for example, macroeconomic and political institutional constraints upon as well as ground for action) today we are all neo-pluralists.

Neofunctionalism is a notable complement to neopluralism, much as functionalism was an important complement to classical pluralism. Neofunctionalism is hardly the pervasive force that functionalism was during the first two decades following World War II. Nevertheless it remains a significant presence in sociology, especially political sociology, neopluralist political sociology most particularly.

Although modern political sociology has existed for more than a century, it came into its own during the decades bridging the victory at the end of World War II and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Especially important in setting the direction for political research with a distinctive focus on “the social bases of politics” was Seymour Martin Lipset's Political Man (1960), published in twenty countries and deemed a “citation classic” by the Social Science Citation Index. The transformative potentials of the social bases of politics were redirected away from the pluralist theoretical tradition by William G. Domhoff's Who Rules America? (1967), which stimulated interest in capitalist power; William Gamson's The Strategy of Social Protest (1975), which expanded attention to the popular bases of power beyond interest groups to social movements; and James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin's Latin America: Reform or Revolution (1967), which excited new interest in the politics of labor movements. The 1980s' ascent of state-centric institutionalism registered a major impact on political sociology with its Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (1985). The works of these times had a common focus on the societal determination of political processes and outcomes and on how state structures cause varied outcomes in different countries.

Before answering where the political economy of the welfare state may be going in the near future, we should first explain what we mean by that powerful but elusive term – “political economy.” Political economy can encompass a maddeningly wide range of studies. In a book aptly titled What Is Political Economy? Martin Staniland asks what it means to title a work “The political economy of … “ (1985, p. 1). He concludes that ”there is no such thing as ‘the theory of political economy,’ and there never will be, in the sense of a single universally accepted complex of assumptions and methodology” (p. 198). He goes on to say that the use of the term “refers to a continuing intellectual enterprise, a particular agenda, a specific object of theoretical ambition” (p. 198). These diverse ways of viewing political economy range from classical and neoclassical economics through Marxist analysis, sociological studies of economic processes in institutional context, and political science analyses of “politico-economic interactions” (Frey 1979; Caporaso and Levine 1992). We will briefly review each approach and place this volume within the overall context of political economy.

The editorial board of the Library of Political Economy at Oxford University Press lists a somewhat earlier definition from economics: