INTRODUCTION

Thinking about welfare and the welfare state has been reflected, among others, in three branches of intellectual activity: economics, ethics, and ideology. While economics and ethics are academic disciplines, ideology is practical and sometimes opaque thought in political and social movements that occasionally results in legislation. Issues of welfare or well-being demand a wide range of intellectual approaches, although they are often mingled together in economic, political, and social thought. For this reason, historical studies of welfare thought and policy should at least cover these three areas and investigate their interrelationship in a historical context.

Debates on welfare issues have a longer history than the rise of so-called welfare economics and the welfare state in the twentieth century might suggest. The welfare thought specifically coined as “welfare economics” in the 1920s and the “welfare state” in the 1940s in Britain had been in circulation under different labels before these designations arose. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain and Germany provided an intellectual scene in which the total configurations of economics, ethics, and ideology in the context of welfare first showed systematic patterns. This period corresponds to Schumpeter's periodization “from 1870 to 1914” in the history of economics (Schumpeter 1954). Although the main topic of this period must no doubt be the establishment and development of neoclassical economics by the Marginal Revolution, Schumpeter did not fail to characterize an aspect of economics during this period as the “Sozialpolitik and the Historical Method.”