Crises of the Welfare State

Abstract

‘The essence of the welfare state’, wrote Wilensky in a classic study, ‘is government-protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health, housing, and education, assured to every citizen’. This innocent definition is, we shall see, highly contestable, but it has the merit of putting into a few words the most important characteristics of modern welfare states: that they necessarily involve some model of citizenship; that they provide a stream of services for people called citizens; and that they use public power to raise the resources for those services and to organize their provision. If there is a crisis of the welfare state it has to involve, in other words, a crisis of citizenship, or a crisis in the capacity of states to raise resources and to transform those resources into services.