Liberalism and the Welfare State

Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State

Edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W.NOSSUB Bateman, TamotsuNOSSUB Nishizawa, and DieterNOSSUB Plehwe

Links the history of economic and political thought to the comparative welfare state literature in novel ways.
Compares liberal economists' thinking about the welfare state across three countries - Britain, Japan and Germany - with different traditions in both liberalism and welfare provision.
Shows how different types of liberalism were related to the history of the welfare state.
Attention is paid to the international and transnational dimensions of neoliberal networks and to the common elements of neoliberal transformations of the welfare state, which replace social citizenship with more or less social varieties of market citizenship.

Liberalism and the Welfare State

Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State

Edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W.NOSSUB Bateman, TamotsuNOSSUB Nishizawa, and DieterNOSSUB Plehwe

Description

The welfare state has, over the past forty years, come under increasing attack from liberals who consider comprehensive welfare provision inimical to liberalism. Yet, many of the architects of the post-World War II welfare states were liberals, many of whom were economists as much as socialists. Liberalism and the Welfare State investigates the thinking of liberal economists about welfare, focusing on Britain, Germany and Japan, each of which had a different tradition of economic thinking and different institutions for welfare provision.

This volume explores the early history of welfare thinking from the British New Liberals of the early twentieth century, German Ordoliberals and post-war Japanese Liberal economists. It delves into arguments about neoliberalism under British Conservative and New Labour governments, after German reunification, and under Koizumi in Japan. Given the importance of both international policy collaboration and international networks of neoliberal economists, this volume also explores neoliberal ideas on federalism and the responses of neoliberal think tanks to the global financial crisis.

Liberalism and the Welfare State provides a comparative analysis of economists' attitudes to the welfare state. Notwithstanding the differences, in each country support emerged very early on for social minimum standards, but strong disagreements within each country quickly developed. The result was divergence, as the debates shaped different welfare regimes. More recently, the strong impact of efficiency related critiques of welfare regimes has crowded out more nuanced and complex discussions of the past. This volume provides a reminder that neither liberalism nor economic ideas in general are inimical to well-designed welfare provision. The ongoing debate on economics and welfare can be greatly improved by way of stronger consideration of different lineages of both liberal and neoliberal lines of economic thought.

Liberalism and the Welfare State

Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State

Edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W.NOSSUB Bateman, TamotsuNOSSUB Nishizawa, and DieterNOSSUB Plehwe

Part I. Varieties of Liberalism and the early welfare state: UK, Germany, and Japan
1. Liberalism and the welfare state in Britain, 1880-1945
Roger Backhouse, Bradley Bateman, and Tamotsu Nishizawa
2. New liberalism to the new right: economists and the British welfare state after 1945
George Peden
3. Ordoliberalism, the Social Market Economy, and Keynesianism: Germany after 1945
Harald Hagemann
4. Non-Liberal Capitalism and a Liberal Welfare Regime? Japanese economists and the welfare state before the 1980s
Tamotsu Nishizawa and Yukihiro Ikeda
Part II. Neoliberalism and the changing understanding of the welfare state
5. Neo-liberalism - from ideas to policy: some preliminary thoughts with particular reference to post-war Britain
Neil Rollings
6. New Labour and neoliberalism
Matt Beech
7. The Initiative for a New Social Market Economy and the transformation of the German welfare regime after unification? (1990)
Daniel Kinderman
8. Neo-liberalism and Market-Disciplining Policy in the Koizumi Reform in Japan
Juro Teranishi
Part III. Varieties of Neoliberalism: International Dimensions
9. National vs Supranational Collective Goods. The Birth and Death of Neoliberal Pluralism
Fabio Masini
10. Neoliberal Think Tanks and the Crisis
Dieter Plehwe
11. Concluding Remarks

Liberalism and the Welfare State

Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State

Edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W.NOSSUB Bateman, TamotsuNOSSUB Nishizawa, and DieterNOSSUB Plehwe

Author Information

Edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics, University of Birmingham, Bradley W.NOSSUB Bateman, President, Randolph College, TamotsuNOSSUB Nishizawa, Professor of Economics, Teikyo University, and DieterNOSSUB Plehwe, Research Fellow, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung

Roger E. Backhouse is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics at the University of Birmingham.

Bradley W. Bateman is President of Randolph College.

Tamotsu Nishizawa is Professor of Economics at Teikyo University.

Dieter Plehwe is a Research Fellow at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.