Ideas on welfare reflect in varying ways and degrees the author's interpretation of existing reality. They can be an endorsement, a critique, a rejection, or a combination of these, of existing institutional arrangements. More often than not, ideas for reform are incremental – they depart only slightly from existing arrangements. Radical departures are rare and usually labelled utopian. But even these are reflections of existing reality – they are rejections of it in favour of some other type of arrangement that, in the eyes of the author, corrects the injustices or inefficiencies of existing society.

The views of the two major political theorists in Classical Athens, Plato and Aristotle, show how the same objective societal reality can evoke very different reactions as regards both politics and welfare. Plato's views are a rejection of Athenian democracy in favour of a communitarian society while Aristotle's views constitute a critique of but also an accommodation to, Athenian society. While they were both critical of what they considered as the inherent political instability of regimes based on democracy, they came up with different solutions to the ‘problem’, as they saw it.

This chapter will, therefore, discuss two contrasting approaches to human welfare: the proposals of Plato for a communitarian society as put forward in his books The Republic and The Laws; and the ideas of Aristotle for an enlightened, modestly interfering state, as they appear in his books The Politics and Ethics. It is worth stressing that their ideas on human welfare referred to small city-states with populations around 200,000 and not to large nation states. Their views must also be assessed with a degree of historical empathy for they were writing at the dawn of human civilisation. On one hand, ideas that are common knowledge today were just being discovered then. Aristotle's statement, for example, that ‘man is a political animal’ is taken for granted today but it was a profound statement when it was made. On the other hand, ideas that were generally accepted then may look strange and even offensive today. The views of both writers on slavery and of Aristotle on women, for example, are both odd and insulting to modern ears.