At only 126 pages, this book is an ambitious attempt by an esteemed scholar of the sociology of social security to review the development of social insurance, assert its importance as the key method for ensuring social security, provide a outline of how sociological study of the institution should proceed and sketch out a possible route for reinvigorating social insurance in the context of ongoing economic crisis. The scope and detail necessary to address such multiple and overlapping issues is both the strength of the text and its most significant weakness.

Divided into three parts and seven chapters, it begins with a sweeping overview of the development of social security, restating the divergent development of social assistance and social insurance across a number of societies over time. Rhys’ starting point is the decline over the last thirty years in the primacy given to social insurance as the main form of social protection and why social insurance remains the most suitable basis for providing a minimum level of benefits for all within society. It is certainly the case that the process of neo-liberalisation has led to a shift in social policy governance from social constitutionalism and social citizenship to economic constitutionalism and market citizenship (Jayasuriya, 2006). Yet, despite touching on the sustained intellectual assault from neo-liberalism and its role in restructuring social security, the compact nature of the book means that Rys never fully explains how, in these circumstances, we can move from where we are to where he would wish us to be. Despite this, the piece often makes salient points regarding the utility of social insurance, which are all too easy to lose sight of amidst policy discourses of activation and obligation. One of the strengths of social insurance, Rys reminds us, is its combination of the collective (solidarity against shared risks) and the individual (notions of self-interest, responsibility and independence). Social insurance should then have a strong appeal for policymakers struggling to balance social risk and individual responsibility. Unfortunately, the ambitious sweep of the book means how such an appeal might be strengthened is not really explored in depth, as the discussion soon moves swiftly on to another area of study. In this case, it is to the development of social security under communism, with Rys usefully drawing attention to how, in its time, social insurance has been rejected, not only by advocates of neo-liberalism, but also some socialists − albeit for different reasons. For revolutionary socialists, social insurance represented an instrument in the class war, which employers used to dampen the revolutionary ardour of the population. Under communism, this led to rejection of social insurance in favour of a total system of state-financed social security. The inclusion of a greater number of more detailed policy examples would have been useful here to help the reader fully grasp how this worked out within and between the communist regimes. As it is, the reader is left unsure as to how the similarities and differences between the communist regimes affected their subsequent adoption of neo-liberal inspired reforms. This is a pity, considering the thrust of the piece is that politics and history matter in the structuring of social security systems. The first part of the book is an interesting overview of key concepts, ideas and developments in social security and establishes the case for reinvigorating social insurance as the principle policy tool for achieving social protection.

Part 2, however, felt somewhat disconnected from the preceding chapters, with much of Chapters 4 and 5 devoted to a potted history of the sociology of social security through a discussion of various meetings and conferences that did, or did not address this avenue of study over the past forty years. For someone new to this discussion, it is an interesting section of the text, but ultimately it overshadows and obscures Rys’ objective to restate the importance of social insurance in systems of social security, and the necessity of investigating the role of demographic, political, economic and sociological factors in shaping their evolution. It is also a pity that a number of examples given in Chapter 6, of the political and economic factors influencing the implementation of World Bank driven pension reform in various post-communist countries, are not fully integrated with the previous discussion of the communist regimes and social security. The final part of the book reflects on how the economic crisis has called into question the drift to the marketisation of social protection measures. Rys argues social insurance is the best means for articulating and providing social security within a socio-political context marked by individualism and self interest, which, whilst shaken by the crisis, has not been abandoned.

The historical and comparative perspective of the first part of the book will provide those new to the field with an excellent understanding of the particular funding, administration and ideological underpinnings of social assistance and social insurance approaches to social security. Part 2 also offers a useful overview of how and why certain policy tools become more dominant over time in some nations and not in others. Yet overall the book is somewhat disjointed. The case supporting Rys’ entreaty to make social insurance the centrepiece of social protection is lost at times, particularly when discussion moves from the captivating historical and comparative analysis to recounting the punctuated academic attention given to the sociology of social security over the last forty years.