220122 Genealogies of the Welfare State in Modern European History (S) (WiSe 2011/2012)

This seminar will introduce students to key themes and scholarly debates surrounding the history of welfare policy in modern Europe. After charting the main explanations for the origins and development of social policies in modern states, the seminar will examine a number of case chronological and thematic case studies, relating them to various strands of sociological and political thought on the development of welfare states. It will problematise whether there was a particular European trajectory in the creation of the welfare state or whether several parallel paths towards the social state have marked European history. It will also question the main tensions inherent within European welfare states, including the struggles for power between central and local states and between different social classes, genders, confessions and races. Finally, it will investigate how welfare states are borne out of and constantly reinvented within particular historical contexts.

1. Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to Sociological and Political Explanations for the Origins of Welfare Policy
2. From the Committee of Public Safety to Social Security? Poverty, Community and Social Rights in the Wake of the French Revolution
3. ‘Making up People’? The Probabilistic Revolution and the Social Question in the early Nineteenth Century
4. Democratization and the Social Question in the Nineteenth Century
5. From the local to the national? Social Insurance, Poor Laws and State Building
6. A Transnational Moment? Social reform, expertise and transnational networks
7. Welfare State, Maternal State?
8. War as Social Revolution?
9. Welfare State, Racial State?
10. The New International Order? International Organisations and the Social State
11. The Beveridge Revolution? The Five Pillars and their European Aftermaths
12. Cold War, Warm State?
13. From the Individual to the Social? From 1789 and back again