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7 - The Social Perspective on Poverty and the Origins of Modern Social Welfare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2009

Larry Frohman
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Stony Brook
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Summary

The Social Perspective on Poverty and the Logic of Social Citizenship

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the creation of a system of poor relief and charity that was designed to consolidate the new bourgeois social order by molding the lower classes into those industrious, disciplined, and providential workers on whom this social formation was believed to depend. This assistantial regime was based on the combination of moral reform and the repressive promotion of self-reliance. However, beginning in the 1890s this regime was challenged by a new paradigm whose primary strategies were prevention and treatment, rather than deterrence. The basic form of social assistance provided under this new regime was known as “social relief” or “social welfare” (soziale Fürsorge), and both the political rationality that drove the development of these programs between 1900 and 1914 and the mechanisms of social intervention that they pioneered in order to achieve their preventive and therapeutic aims were soon to become defining features of the welfare state.

The history of the German welfare state in this period is an extraordinarily complex one that sprawls across the entire social landscape of imperial Germany, and it cannot easily be captured in a limited space. It developed at a number of different levels, each with its own logic and temporality, and it is important not to lose sight of the complexity, contradictoriness, and asynchronicity of the process even as we try to give the story a degree of conceptual and narrative unity.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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