We do occasionally reach moments at which important bodies of academic scholarship have crystallized into a coherent shape, and at which the political practices to which they are addressed have been with us long enough to permit the construction of generalizations of value. Those are the moments at which high-quality stock takings are often essential. We are at such a moment with the literature on the “Third Way” and on its social policy, and in Jane Lewis and Rebecca Surender's Welfare State Change we have just such a stock taking.

This remarkably fine collection of essays explores the origins, content, and consequences of recent social policy reform in advanced industrial economies under center-left political leadership. It focuses on four aspects of welfare provision—state governance, labor markets, the voluntary sector, and the family—and does so in a way that is simultaneously both UK-focused and genuinely comparative. The essays contained here are, to varying degrees, concerned with the extent to which something that might be labeled a “third way” political project is moving us toward a new kind of welfare regime. They are also, to varying degrees, concerned with explaining why the kind of welfare regime that is emerging is differentially labeled: sometimes hailed as quintessentially Third Way in inspiration and character, and sometimes not hailed at all. This twin focus enables the collection to tell us important things both about continuity and change in welfare systems and about the nature of the Third Way project that is supposedly inspiring whatever change is currently underway.

As a collection of essays, there is no complete uniformity of approach and argument across this volume as a whole, and yet its component elements do have important things in common. They share a remarkably high and consistent standard of writing, and an associated willingness to engage with the latest scholarship in their particular subfields. They share a common focus on the UK's New Labour government, alongside a propensity to situate that government in a wider sweep of comparable center-left experiences: a sweep that stretches from Australia, Germany, and Canada to Sweden and the United States. And in consequence, they share a suitable skepticism about the degree to which New Labour's social policy initiatives are in any profound sense new, preferring instead to emphasize the similarity of social policy changes across industrial systems as a whole. Many times in this collection we are told that the rhetoric varies more than the policies do, that “there seems to be much more similarity in what social democrats across the globe are doing than in what they are saying” (p. 62). We are also told that New Labour owes its global reputation “less to its inherent originality than to the aggressive international promotion of the political discourse with which it was ‘marketed’ domestically: the Third Way” (p. 94). Both these things have long needed to be said to many of the existing commentators on the politics of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. They will make salutary reading for a British Left whose long-established parochialism often leaves its leading practitioners ignorant of equivalent policy trajectories elsewhere.

In a collection of this quality, it is almost invidious to single out individual chapters for special mention. Readers will find information, argument, and reflection of value in each, depending on their interests. But I was struck by the particular quality of Rebecca Surender's opening discussion of the issues in play, by Gordon White's fascinating examination of Third Way attitudes to equality as a policy goal, and by Guiliano Boneli and Martin Powell's sophisticated discussion of the various ways in which the Third Way project has been, and is being, conceptualized. I was struck, too, by the importance of Mary Daly and Ruth Lister's differing examinations of family policy and Third Way attitudes to education and children. The limitations of the workerist ethic that is such a feature of New Labour social policy is very evident in what they report here: In the recognition, as Ruth Lister has it (pp. 175–76) that though New Labour ministers give priority to “children, and especially children in poverty,” too often they do so only because they see these children as “future citizen workers,” a subordination of social policy to economic ends in which “the quality of their childhood risks being overshadowed.” As New Labour struggles to regain its popularity in the wake of the 2005 general election, its leaders would do well to read these perceptive reflections on the policy changes required to effect a real easing of the work–life balance. For though currently New Labour may not be working, its supporters certainly are! They are working far too much, and so too are their children. Yet as this collection makes clear, encouraging center-left voters to hand their children over to paid caregivers, so that those voters can work even longer and harder, is hardly the best way to enhance the quality of life so central to Third Way social claims—or indeed to keep New Labour permanently in power.

If this collection disappoints at all, it does so only by its caution. There is exposition here, and on occasion muted critique; but there is no overall evaluation of the adequacy of Third Way thinking to the agenda facing social policymakers in the new century. And that is a pity, since in the UK at least, we now have clear evidence—not least from research units as disparate as the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies—that so far at least, the impact of New Labour's Third Way thinking has been very muted indeed, that for all New Labour's years in office, inequality in the UK remains entrenched and social mobility remain stuck at its limited postwar level. For that reason if for no other, it would be good to see this collection of scholars put to another task: that of designing policy that could genuinely deliver the social justice that Third Way politicians so regularly promise but fail to deliver. The subtitle of this collection is Towards a Third Way. Having read it, I am more convinced than ever that we now need one subtitled “towards a fourth way.”