1 - Speculation and discipline

Summary

My aim in this book is to unite two incompatible ambitions: speculation and discipline. Let us begin with the former. In several ways, this book is a speculative one. Firstly, because it tries to say something about the shape of the future, an always daring (not to say foolhardy) enterprise. The future I make so bold as to describe, moreover, is that of a phenomenon which today is both contested and in the midst of change: the universal welfare state. As Sweden is perhaps the most prominent example of such a welfare state, I will mostly use Swedish data in this study.

A second speculative feature inheres in the fact that, in contrast to most social scientific research undertaken today, this book is both openly normative and empirical. I do not restrict my efforts to describing and explaining the characteristic features of the universal welfare state; I also submit arguments for how this policy should be framed in the future, and I attempt to justify these proposals. This approach is not (or at least not only) dictated by a need to air my political values and social prejudices. I write this book, rather, in the conviction that the discussion of welfare policy must always remain incomplete until the normative problems raised by the question of social justice are confronted.