Welfarism

Within a single society, there are a number of diverging views of ‘the welfare of the people as a whole’. Conservatives and radicals have appealed to the idea that society must ensure that the community as a whole must flourish, not just successful individuals competing with each other for resources. The idea of a welfare state (Wohlfahrstaat, in German, l’Etat providence in French)) started as a rather paternalist idea − those in power having pity on the poor and offering them support as a matter of charity. But in the twentieth century, and especially after the Second World War, the idea has grown up that people are entitled to a certain minimum level of welfare and have a right to basic levels of housing, income, health care, education, and social services. The role of the State (at central or local level) in this second approach is to ensure that these entitlements are delivered. Within the idea of welfarism, tort law would function as a way of satisfying a right to social protection. If someone suffers as a result of an unintended consequence of broadly desirable social activities (such as running factories, having fast transport by road or rail, or the operation of hospitals or other medical services), then society should ensure that they receive an adequate level of compensation. A person might be compensated for illness if the state ensures that he or she has access to medical services or by allowing them to receive monetary compensation from the person causing their injury in order to buy appropriate care or treatment. A person might be compensated for loss of employment either through social insurance (state payments for the time the injured person has to spend off work) or through tort law (an action brought by the injured against the person who caused the wrong).

Welfare Thinkers

Hegel

Hegel pointed out the new industrial and urban society led to an estrangement from age-old ownership of the soil, to replacing family life by impersonal civil society, the declining adequacy of charity, and the inescapable need for the filling welfare gaps by some form of disinterested public provision. Hegel’s thoughts on these matters have long been seen as influential in the rise of later idealist and communitarian schools of thought, where many of the precursors of twentieth-century welfare thinking were to be found. His conception of ‘civil society’ as an intermediate site of social provision lying somewhere between the market and the state has found much favour with proponents of a ‘mixed economy of welfare’. It might be argued that Hegel’s most important contribution to welfare thought was a much more muted one; it was simply his re-assertion of the old natural law principle of a human being’s inalienable right to subsistence, as the basis of public obligation to those in need.

Comte

In France, the ideas of Auguste Comte were prominent. He thought that the increasing division of labour could undermine social cohesion, breaking society ‘into a multitude of unconnected corporations which scarcely seem to belong to the same species’. The state must intervene ‘sufficiently to contain and so far as possible arrest this fatal disposition to the fundamental dispersion of ideas, sentiments and interests’. It would have to ‘intervene appropriately in the daily performance of all the various functions of the social economy, to sustain continuously the idea of the whole and the sentiment of common solidarity.’

This influenced in the “solidarist” movement, among graduates of the Grandes Ecoles (the major institutions educating French leaders), and above all in the public law specialist, Pierre Laroque, who became the chief theorist and designer of the French welfare state in 1945. Writers in this tradition had different priorities, but they all had certain characteristics in common that loosely echoed the doctrines of Comte – among them the use of social security as a deliberate tool of social integration, an interest in popular participation in welfare management, an idealised view of the traditional child-rearing functions of women, and a commitment to ‘Altruism’ as much more than a private virtue but as a guiding philosophy of public life.