The end of the welfare state?

The founders themselves would have been keenly sensitive to the diversity of motives and models underlying what we now know as ‘the’ welfare \nstate. Bismarck’s conservative corporatist version built on frankly neo-feudal \nfoundations to buy social peace. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s social democratic \nmodel aimed to generate more Swedish babies (Tilton 1990). The British \nwelfare state was principally the product of two renegade Liberals, Lloyd \nGeorge and Beveridge (Beveridge 1942). The American welfare state was a \npatrician Democrat’s noblesse oblige response to the Great Depression, relieving distress among the old and disabled, the widowed and the chronically \nill (Hofstadter 1948, ch. 12)