The politics of welfare
| Author | Lois McNay |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211008002 |
| Published date | 01 January 2023 |
| Date | 01 January 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
Review Article EJPT
The politics of welfare
Lois McNay
Oxford University, UK
Steven Klein, The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State, Cambridge Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-47862-5, Hardback, £75.
Abstract
Steven Klein’s excellent new book The Work of Politics is an innovative, insightful and
original argument about the valuable role that welfare institutions may play in demo-
cratic movements for change. In place of a one-sided Weberian view of welfare insti-
tutions as bureaucratic instruments of social control, Klein recasts them in Arendtian
terms as ‘worldly mediators’ or participatory mechanisms that act as channels for a
radical politics of democratic world making. Although Klein is careful to modulate this
utopian vision through a developed account of power and domination, I question the
relevance of this largely historical model of world-building activism for the contempo-
rary world of welfare. I point to the way that decades of neoliberal social policy have
arguably eroded many of the social conditions and relations of solidarity that are vital
prerequisites for collective activism around welfare.
Keywords
Activism, domination, neoliberalism, welfare, worldbuilding
The aim of Steven Klein’s thought-provoking new book is to dislodge a commonly
held, but limited, view of welfare institutions as bureaucratized instruments of
social control and to reconstrue them instead in dynamic terms as catalysts of
progressive social change. By recalling how welfare institutions have been impor-
tant sites of democratic conflict at various points in the 20th century, he seeks to
remind thinkers nowadays of their latent but forgotten potential for galvanizing
Corresponding author:
Lois McNay, Somerville College, Oxford University, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6HD, UK.
Email: lois.mcnay@some.ox.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14748851211008002
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2023, Vol. 22(1) 171–180
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