Should-Read: Susan Pedersen: Reviews ‘Bread for All’
Should-Read: Our social insurance state still (largely) presumes the stable two-parent family. In lots of ways it does not fit today’s American society, in which men in divorce threaten to seek custody on the basis of their higher incomes and so get women to accept impoverishing negotiated settlements: Susan Pedersen: Reviews ‘Bread for All’: “The welfare state emerges in this account as the culmination of a series of individual, sometimes problematic and sometimes heroic, engagements and commitments…
…Edwin Chadwick struggling with drains and contagion, Francis Galton puzzling over ‘defect’ and degeneracy, Octavia Hill setting up model housing and disciplining her unruly tenants, Charles Booth sending his army of volunteers out to categorise and analyse London’s working class. Some of the sons and daughters of those evangelical shipping magnates and manufacturers who racked up fortunes during Britain’s free-trading heyday, it seems, felt guilty, not complacent, about their privilege…. A school of thought born to open up a society riddled with rank and patronage to merit and markets ended up documenting the inability of individualised freedom alone to deliver prosperity and justice. At a moment when the public reputation of ‘experts’ is lower than that of, say, vivisectionists, it’s nice to read a book that insists so strenuously that social scientists, armed with knowledge and numbers and driven by ambition and empathy, teamed up with politicians (another unloved group) to improve the world decisively and lastingly….
The book does provide a good and readable account of the making of the Beveridgean welfare state. But without a sharper analytical focus, and especially some attention to Beveridge’s ideas about how to provide income security without disordering family life, the book not only ignores the welfare state’s disciplinary function but also rather overlooks how poorly it served disadvantaged groups–notably mothers–when the social relations Beveridge thought so stable came apart…