Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Administration in a Changing Society
- 2 The Social Division of Welfare
- 3 Pension Systems and Population Change
- 4 War and Social Policy
- 5 The Position of Women
- 6 Industrialization and the Family
- 7 The Hospital and its Patients
- 8 The National Health Service in England: Some Aspects of Structure
- 9 The National Health Service in England: Some Facts about General Practice
- 10 The National Health Service in England: Science and the Sociology of Medical Care
- Appendix to Lectures on the National Health Service in England: Summary of Evidence and Sources of Reference on the Quantity and Quality of the General Practitioner’s Work
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - War and Social Policy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Administration in a Changing Society
- 2 The Social Division of Welfare
- 3 Pension Systems and Population Change
- 4 War and Social Policy
- 5 The Position of Women
- 6 Industrialization and the Family
- 7 The Hospital and its Patients
- 8 The National Health Service in England: Some Aspects of Structure
- 9 The National Health Service in England: Some Facts about General Practice
- 10 The National Health Service in England: Science and the Sociology of Medical Care
- Appendix to Lectures on the National Health Service in England: Summary of Evidence and Sources of Reference on the Quantity and Quality of the General Practitioner’s Work
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Professor Gibbs, in reappraising the contribution made by Clausewitz to military studies, has politely but firmly criticized past historians for bringing their histories to a stop when the guns started firing, and in opening a new chapter only with the return of peace — of normal diplomatic and institutional relationships between sovereign States. Following Clausewitz — a much misunderstood thinker — Professor Gibbs deplored this historical interregnum. He was faced with a lack of balance in the material available to him in reflecting about the nature of war and society. He could hardly complain, however, about the quantity of historical studies at his disposal. Military and naval documents, regimental histories, the lives of captains and kings, political, diplomatic and even philosophical works jostle each other for a place in the crowded ‘war’ index and bear witness to the energy and interests of past students of war, and to the endemic character of war in the history of man.
By contrast, I am doubly handicapped in discussing the relationship of war and social policy. So far as the story of modern war before 1939 is concerned, little has been recorded in any systematic way about the social arid economic effects of war on the population as a whole. Only long and patient research in out-of-the-way documentary places can reveal something of the characteristics and flavour of social life during the experience of wars in the past. And these records are often undisciplined and unreliable. There are, for example, somewhat highly-coloured accounts of popular reactions on the south coasts of England to the threat of invasion when Napoleon Bonaparte was master of all Western Europe; of the effects of the Crimean and Boer Wars on poor law policy in those days; of a remarkable decline in criminal behaviour among civilians in Britain during the First World War and an equally remarkable outbreak of panic among the civilians of London when the first Zeppelins arrived with their primitive bombs, most of which failed to explode. But even such accounts, unreliable as they may be, are hard to come by.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Essays on the Welfare State (Reissue) , pp. 44 - 53Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018