How Socialist is Solidaristic Social Policy? Swedish Postwar Reform as a Case in Point

Abstract

SUMMARYThe postwar welfare state, as epitomized by Beveridge's Plan, seemed to mark a major departure from social policy's traditional Bismarckian ambition to ameliorate and preserve existing social circumstances. Many have found the reason for this turnabout in the power that parties of the Left achieved in the immediate postwar years, in Britain and especially in Scandinavia where reform was most pronounced. The article questions this political pedigree by examining the origins of postwar reforms, in this case in Sweden, in the ambitions and interests of the bourgeois parties and by analyzing the initial reluctance of the Social Democrats to follow the new reforming initiatives coming from the parties of the middle classes.