E. P. Hennock's The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany is the product of more than three decades of reflection on the topic, and it is sure to find a wide audience among historians of social policy and the welfare state in both Germany and Britain. The book covers for both countries the entire gamut of policies and programs that collectively constituted that entity known in retrospect as the welfare state, including the poor laws, labor protection legislation, school meals, and the different national schemes of social insurance and state pensions (sickness, accident or worker's compensation, disability, and old age, as well as unemployment and, for Germany, insurance for white-collar workers). It is no small feat to bring all of this within the covers of a single book, and even so this represents only an abbreviated version of what was originally conceived as a much larger project. It is also the first English-language book to make extensive use of the already published volumes of the Quellensammlung zur Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik (http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb4/akademie/).

The question that guides Hennock's comparison is why the historiography of the German welfare state pivots so distinctly around Bismarckian social insurance while the history of the British welfare state has been so colored by the long shadow of the poor laws. His answer is that, to a large degree, the different historiographies reflect different historical realities. According to Hennock, the form and function of these diverse social programs in the two countries were primarily determined by their relation to their respective poor laws. If the main purpose of social legislation was simply to find a way of meeting the basic needs of the deserving poor without subjecting them to the social and political discrimination associated with poor relief, then the most direct solution was to be found in a state pension system. This was true even though the financing of such a system out of general tax revenues meant that, although potentially universal, benefits would only be more or less equivalent to those provided by the poor laws. The character of British old age pensions and its subsequent national insurance system was, therefore, determined by the fact that it “was an aspect of the politics of poverty” and “remained part of the reform of the Poor Law” (p. 241). In Germany, by contrast, social insurance was introduced in the 1880s as part of Bismarck's strategy for consolidating the Empire on conservative terms. It soon became clear, though, that gaining the loyalty of the working classes would mean that the proposed insurance programs would have to offer them something more attractive than poor relief in disguise, though considerations of poor law finance were never far from anyone's mind. Since such programs would be prohibitively expensive to the public purse, however, the only solution was a contributory insurance scheme with benefits graduated in accordance with wages and contributions (p. 198). The counterfactual example here is widows and orphans, who were neglected and then treated in a niggardly manner by the social insurance programs precisely because they did not represent a powerful constituency whose needs had to be taken into account.

This basic framework makes a lot of sense. Of course, none of this happened in such a straightforward manner, and the programs that emerged from the legislative process were frequently quite different than their sponsors had originally intended. The bulk of the narrative for both countries focuses on parliamentary, ministerial, and interest group politicking, while social reform ideas only play a secondary role. This is both a strength and a weakness since we learn much more about the evolution of social programs and policies in the form that they had assumed by 1914 than we do about how they cumulatively transformed the structures and dynamic of industrial society and how they might constitute something known as the “welfare state.”

The second set of questions that Hennock seeks to answer is why Germany relied on compulsory insurance while Britain continued to favor voluntary institutions, and the consequences of this decision. The answer he gives to the first question is twofold. First, Hennock argues that, while guilds had broken down much earlier in Britain and created a space in which friendly societies could develop to meet the needs of formally free wage laborers in a manner consistent with the needs of a market economy, in Germany (or, to be more specific in this case, in Prussia), the state imposed its own social security mechanisms in order to break the power of the guilds and create the preconditions for a capitalist labor market, a claim that Hennock illustrates through his account of the Hilfskassen. This was a strategy that meshed well with Bismarck's goal of making the state into the paternalistic benefactor of the working classes and the poor. The second claim, one that I find less convincing, is that German policy-makers opted for compulsion because they believed that “in the absence of compulsion workers would not make the savings to ensure their needs” (p. 242). The fetishization of savings as the solution to the social question had lost its credibility by the 1860s; the working classes were less in need of compulsory thrift than of higher salaries and employer contributions to provide for sickness and old age; and the needs for portability of coverage and to include both good and bad risks in the risk pool were much more important in the decision to make insurance compulsory within specific industries. As to the relative merits of the divergent national approaches, although Hennock speaks highly of nineteenth-century British voluntarism and casts Theodor Lohmann as a liberal antagonist to Bismarck, in the long run, he argues, the German decision for state-help proved to be more fertile. This was not because it was intrinsically superior to self-help, but rather because the need to meet the needs of the wage-earning classes in a way that was acceptable to them made the German compulsory insurance system more dynamic and more responsive than a British system whose persistent weaknesses can be attributed to the fact that it remained, to World War II and beyond, mortgaged to its poor law origins.

In sum, Hennock's tightly focused Anglo-German comparisons succeed in illuminating many of the key welfare state structures in the two countries, and the arguments he develops here are certain to remain a key point of reference in a debate that, despite recent pressures for the retrenchment or rethinking of the welfare state, shows no signs of imminent death.