Book Review: Three Roads to the Welfare State by Bryan Fanning

Abstract

Brian Fanning’s book is an intellectual history of key (mainly European) thinkers’ views on the place of social policy in modern society. His particular focus is on three central intellectual and ideological approaches – liberalism, social democracy, and Christian democracy, and their mutual influence in addressing social problems. This account is interspersed with a history of European Welfare State politics, institutions and interventions. The book opens with an exploration of the intellectual foundations of laissez faire via a series of key texts and (mainly English) contexts – a method replicated in subsequent chapters. The differing understandings of poverty and poverty alleviation are insightfully explored, for example distinguishing between the punitive views of Joseph Townsend and the more humanistic approach of Adam Smith. The chapter on Utopian Socialism concentrates on Robert Owen and the cooperative movement, the latter seen as running alongside and ameliorating, rather than replacing, the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. Other thinkers discussed include William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, Mary Wollstonecraft, and B. F. Skinner, and the paternalistic strain in much of this thinking is deftly highlighted. The chapter following discusses the shift from free market to reform liberalism, albeit under the sign of a severely restricted franchise. Fanning here concentrates on the works of Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and on Chadwick’s influence on the new Poor Law and the Factory Acts, as they grappled with the limitations of laissez-faire in addressing the needs of an emerging industrial and urban society. Book Reviews