From Prevention to Promotion: Rethinking the Political Rationality of Social Assistance

In his famous 1961 essay on “The Welfare State in Historical Perspective,” Asa Briggs drew a distinction between what he called the “social service state,” which guaranteed individuals and families a minimum income irrespective of their position in the labor market and provided a degree of security against such contingencies as sickness, old age, and unemployment, and the “welfare state,” which went beyond securing this minimum to ensure that all citizens enjoyed a fair share in the resources of the nation, a share that would permit them to realize their individual potential without being constrained by preventable illness, want, and ignorance. In this chapter I will argue that wartime youth welfare programs served as one of the mediums for the articulation of a new, distinctly Progressive approach to the problem of social inequality that provided the theoretical foundation for the twentieth-century German welfare state along the lines described by Briggs. Although the key ideas here had already been advanced in the debate over the social evolution of poor relief, the war transformed the political rationality of social assistance in a way that made the active promotion of the welfare of needy and endangered individuals appear more important than avoiding the moral hazards traditionally associated with any assistance that exceeded the deterrent existence minimum.