This chapter argues for a shift in perspective from Max Weber's theory of value to a theory of worldliness, one drawn from the thought of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Worldliness points to how our involvement in the everyday world is never reducible to technical calculation. The chapter uses this idea to illuminate the relationship between democratic action and the welfare state. Technical calculation, which strives to treat subjects as objects, is mediated by a material world that constitutes a space of collective, non-technical judgments. Welfare institutions, then, are both mechanisms of technical control and worldly objects that form the potential context for political judgment and mobilization. Heidegger and Arendt's analysis of worldliness provides theoretical tools for envisioning the welfare state as a site of democratic mobilization and participation-a perspective embodied in the response of the German workers' movement to Bismarck's reforms. The chapter concludes by examining this response, reconstructing the distinctive socialist vision of social reform.

The conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the book, discusses how they could guide decisions about alternative ways of structuring welfare institutions, examines the context of the American welfare state, and discusses the potential future of the welfare state.

The introduction introduces the basic concerns of the book: how to think about the welfare state in the context of democratic struggles against domination. It examines recent debates about the relationship between democracy and the welfare state as well as work in comparative political science and comparative political economy about the welfare state. It situates the argument of the book in the context of critical theories of domination. Finally, it outlines the plan for the book.

This chapter turns to Max Weber's thought, situating him within the larger tradition of German social liberalism, to unearth the implicit assumptions that structure current theories of the relationship between democracy, domination, and the welfare state. Weber's thought forces democratic thinkers and actors to confront the inevitability of complex, bureaucratic organizations in the modern state and the distinctive challenges they pose to transformative politics. At the same time, Weber himself had an ambivalent relationship to such democratic politics. He shares with the social liberals the idea that welfare institutions can turn the democratic demands of the German socialists into the objects of instrumental state administration. They could, so he hoped, transform political conflicts over the organization of power within society-and the challenge to entrenched structures of domination that entailed-into conflicts over material needs that could be rendered calculable by state institutions. Weber's thought represents, at once, a necessary point of departure for thinking about democratic action in the welfare state as well as a particularly vivid distillation of the underlying assumptions that narrow the political horizon of current democratic theorists.

This chapter develops a theory of domination, one that helps discern the normative potential of welfare institutions for democratic social movements. It critically appraises three existing approaches to domination: neo-republican approaches that focus on direct domination, neo-Kantian approaches that focus on structural domination, and post-structuralist approaches that focus on abstract domination. In each case, the chapter shows that the distinctive understanding of domination produces a different picture of the welfare state-both in terms of how we should understand the functioning of welfare institutions as well as how such institutions can overcome or reinforce structures of domination. The chapter argues that domination exists in three worlds-the objective, the intersubjective, and the subjective – each corresponding to a different "face" of power. Advocates of these three perspectives fail to recognize these distinctive levels of analysis or worlds and so overgeneralize from one level of analysis. These three theories, then, offer important insights into the nature of domination – but they are only the building blocks of a theory of democracy, domination, and the welfare state.

This chapter reconstructs JŸrgen Habermas's critical theory of domination and uses it to examine the relationship between welfare institutions and democratic social movements. While most scholars approach Habermas as a normative theorist who identifies the moral basis for political critique and democracy in the universal features of human communication, the chapter focuses on another aspect of Habermas's thought: his analysis of the practices through which domination is sustained as well as overcome. The chapter develops two concepts from Habermas's early thought: the causality of fate and the dialectic of moral life. The first term refers to the peculiar manner in which individuals who exist within a structure of domination come to understand themselves as participants in that structure; while the second refers to the political dynamic through which that recognition propels the potential transformation of that structure. The chapter then turns to the critique of gender domination in the Sweden to show how Habermas's categories can help illuminate concrete struggles in the welfare state.