Abstract: Extract This book describes how experts in the "old" Federal Republic of Germany (1949–1989) sought to make sense of the vast array of state programs, expenditures, and bureaucracies aimed at solving social problems. These observers worked in the fields of politics, economics, law, social policy, sociology, and philosophy. They made sense of the developing welfare state by describing discrete programs and by explaining what the programs meant as a whole. Their real concern was to grasp their state, which was now social (one German word for the welfare state is indeed Sozialstaat), and their society, which was permeated by state policies. This book, in other words, investigates political thought under the conditions of the postwar welfare state. It argues that the welfare state informs and alters basic questions of democracy, at first subtly, but as those institutions take on broader and more concrete forms after the 1950s, ever more centrally. Three themes will emerge:
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-03-14
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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