It is gratifying to see that all the respondents broadly endorsed our principal arguments and demands. All of them, from their varying societies and countries, describe the terror and damage of unbridled neoliberalism and its devastation of lives and well-being, especially among the most downtrodden and vulnerable. They all note similar patterns and social and economic trends, as what Schram rightly calls disposable populations grow in size, inequalities between the wealthiest and the rest widen and deepen, and as the state responses to welfare, crime and protest become ever more authoritarian and disciplinary. In general terms, in many of the core capitalist societies, such as the US, the UK and Canada, the overall trajectory of the state today is more concerned with minimising costs, social control, management and discipline, rather than seeking to ameliorate the problems of poverty and unemployment. The extraordinary increases in incarceration and surveillance of the population provide stark examples both of the contemporary neoliberal state's orientation to its own people and the mining of corporate profits on the backs of the most disadvantaged. For the poorest, the agents of social control and the gatekeepers of declining resources are now as likely to wear the outfits of a private corporation as they are the uniforms of the police or the prison service.

The concept of contradiction has been a long-held tenet of critical welfare state analysis, and in this book Abramowitz classically sets out the manner in which the state's welfare measures are simultaneously good and bad for people. As social workers know well, service usersoften appreciate and need state services yet despise the manner in which they are allocated (such as humiliating and stigmatising assessment processes) and the inadequacy of the resources available. For many progressive workers in state welfare an implicit daily aspect of their work has involved and does involve exploring the spaces and opportunities the contradictions of state welfare open up for humane practice. A UK publication from the 1970s entitled In and against the state (London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1980), which was the product of the work of a range of engaged state welfare professionals from social workers to housing officers and academics, offers an outstanding example of this kind of activity.