While the 1834 New Poor Law and the controversies over its reform represent one of the central threads in every narrative of the history of modern Britain, the same can hardly be said of the German poor laws, whose history is far less known. This is due in large part to a historiographical tradition that sees the Bismarckian social insurance programs as the fons et origo of the German welfare state and thus marginalizes all forms of social assistance that can not be neatly fitted into the narrative pre-history or subsequent development of these programs. This contrasts with a British tradition where, as E. P. Hennock has recently argued, national insurance was primarily conceived as a means of poor law reform, and where the poor laws figure prominently in the historiography of the welfare state.Footnote ¹ On the other hand, this insurance-centered approach to the welfare state is not entirely to blame because, for their part, historians of poor relief have not been able to establish any positive connections between individualized, subsidiary, deterrent relief and social insurance or social security systems based on rights deriving from either contributions or citizenship.

These narrative blinkers also blind us to the fact that the welfare state can by no means be equated with social insurance alone. In Germany from the turn of the century onwards, the role of poor relief as the primary means of assisting the poor was increasingly challenged by the development of a dense network of social welfare (soziale Fürsorge) programs, which aimed at preventing or curing need, rather than merely relieving destitution. This trend away from deterrent poor relief was intensified and accelerated by the diverse programs created to respond to the new claims made upon the state by the victims of World War I and the ensuing inflation. These developments were codified by the social legislation of the early Weimar years, though poor relief continued to exist in an atrophied form until it was formally abolished by the 1961 Federal Social Welfare Law.Footnote ²

Here I would like to suggest that these preventive social welfare programs, which represent the second pillar of the German welfare system, were as much an evolution out of traditional poor relief and charity as they were a rejection of its underlying principles and that this turn from deterrence to prevention represents the conceptual missing link connecting the history of the poor laws to that of the welfare state. I will pursue two main arguments. First, my goal is to articulate what I see as an alternative genealogy of the welfare state by exploring this complex, dialectical relationship between the poor laws and preventive social welfare. While the spread of these new social programs led to the gradual hollowing out of nineteenth-century poor relief, whose scope was thereby progressively diminished, in the years between the turn of the century and World War I the idea of prevention began to coalesce as a coherent alternative to deterrence, while at the same time the assistantial vacuum created by diminishing public support for the principle of deterrence was increasingly filled by social programs designed to prevent the diverse forms of need that collectively constituted the modern social question. It was this double movement that defined the “break-up” of the poor laws, to borrow a phrase from the British social reformer Beatrice Webb.

In Britain, the classic site of confrontation between these two assistantial regimes was the Royal Commission appointed in 1905 to consider revisions of the poor laws. In Germany, the debate over the relationship between deterrent poor relief, social policy, and preventive social welfare was conceptualized in terms of the “social evolution” (soziale Ausgestaltung) of poor relief, which was debated at the 1901 and 1905 meetings of the German Association for Poor Relief and Charity. Although the proceedings of the British poor law commission are one of the great set pieces of any account of turn-of-the-century social policy in that country, this German debate has, surprisingly, never been the object of systematic study, even though it preceded its more famous British counterpart by several years. I will use the following account of the proposals advanced in both countries to reform the poor laws out of existence to integrate German Progressivism into the broader pan-Atlantic social reform dialogue and show that we need to take German social reformers seriously as theorists of not only social insurance, but also of social welfare and the social welfare state that began to assume recognizable form in all Western industrialized countries during these decades.

The second question I will address is how this transition from one assistantial regime to another was theorized and legitimated. My argument here is that we need to understand the debate over the social evolution of poor relief in terms of a confrontation between the principles of classical liberalism and those of the new Progressive movement. The impulse behind this systematic rethinking of the principles of public assistance did not come exclusively from Progressive relief officials and social reformers. The main impetus for reform came from a poor relief system whose underlying principles were increasingly out of joint with the realities of Wilhelmine society. The growing involvement of the working classes, and especially social democracy, with its Marxist explanation of poverty as a question of class rather than character, undoubtedly intensified the pressure for reform, though we should not, on the other hand, underestimate either the capacity of liberalism to reinvent itself or the role of the bourgeois women's movement in facilitating the turn from relief to prevention. I do, however, wish to make three specific claims: (1) The new interventionist strategies associated with preventive social welfare were predicated on a rethinking of the liberal social contract in terms of a complex web of social rights and social obligations that was the distinguishing characteristic of the broader Progressive movement. (2) The attempt to put these principles into practice pointed—in Germany, as in Britain—toward the break-up of the poor laws. (3) We are most likely to penetrate to the heart of German Progressivism through the study of the theory and practice of welfare reform, rather than through the analysis of parliamentary politics.

The fortunes of deterrent poor relief are obviously a matter of relevance to the history of every European country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as is the history of Progressivism. While deterrent relief had regarded the poor as a burden on society and thus left them to their own devices, the emergent discourse on welfare increasingly regarded the laboring classes as a precious national resource, and dependence, sickness, delinquency and criminality were seen to entail costs to the entire nation that could no longer be tolerated in the age of state-making and imperialist competition. Building on these new attitudes toward the laboring poor, Progressivism articulated a more social understanding of the nature of need as the result of structural or environmental causes. This led, in turn, to the inversion of the political and moral rationality of deterrence in the name of a new social contract in which the needy would enjoy more expansive social rights to those preventive and curative social programs that would put them in a position where they would be able to fulfill the more extensive social duties expected of them as parents, workers, soldiers, and citizens. Such an idea was simply inconceivable within the intellectual framework of classical liberalism, and we must, therefore, read the history of social assistance after the turn of the century as the history of the successive attempts to resolve what proved to be an irresolvable conflict between the liberal logic of deterrence and the Progressive logic of prevention. Perhaps more than anything else, the need to grapple with this set of problems represents the generative origin of the labile, seemingly contradictory body of social and cultural reform proposals that collectively constituted the Progressive project.

In the following, I will begin by describing the organization of deterrent poor relief and the intellectual problematic of Progressivism in order to clarify the issues that were at stake in the debate over the break-up of the poor laws. The next section will examine the debate over poor law reform in the context of the Royal Commission. Here I will argue that there is a striking similarity between the Fabian social contract worked out by Beatrice and Sidney Webb to justify the break-up of the poor laws and the arguments advanced on behalf of the social evolution of poor relief in Germany. These ideas will be the topic of the following section. The spread of Progressive reforms was limited before World War I. However, in the concluding section I will argue that the war broke through these limits, that from 1914 onwards the theory and practice of social assistance in Germany was increasingly defined in terms of prevention, rather than deterrence, and that the Weimar social welfare system simply codified the principles of prevention and social citizenship first articulated in the pre-war debate on the social evolution of poor relief.

THE ORGANIZATION OF DETERRENCE

In both England and Germany, deterrence was the organizing principle of nineteenth-century public assistance systems that were designed to combat a social problem defined in terms of vice and demoralization, rather than material destitution, and that aimed at the prevention of pauperism, rather than of poverty. In both countries, there was an essential affinity between the deterrent promotion of self-reliance and liberal ideas concerning self-help, the minimal state, and the self-regulating nature of civil society, the market economy, and public opinion.

Beginning in the 1790s, English reformers directed their criticisms primarily at both the practice of providing outdoor assistance through relief in aid of wages (the so-called Speenhamland system, which guaranteed a minimum income regardless of earnings), and the tradition of providing assistance to able-bodied, but seasonally unemployed workers and to workers with more children than they could support on their regular earnings.Footnote ³ Reformers charged that these practices “demoralized” the laboring classes, in two ways: First, they diminished the incentive of able-bodied workers—secure in the knowledge that they could rely on the largesse of others—to support themselves and their families. Second, they provided employers with an equally strong incentive to reduce wages below the subsistence level and thus foist part of their labor costs onto the taxpaying public through the poor rates. Subsequent research has shown these practices to be a reasoned if paternalistic response to rural un(der)employment by landowning classes who feared the out-migration of their workforce and convincingly challenged the idea that these practices either discouraged the poor from seeking work or pushed down wage rates. However, contemporaries saw these practices in a different light and argued that such a perverse constellation of (dis)incentives was precipitating the moral and economic ruin of the nation.Footnote ⁴

The goal of the New Poor Law was to “dispauperize” what its architects saw as a demoralized pauper class by altering the incentive structure of poor relief, though the relation between the moral elevation of these paupers and the hegemonic project of a market society on the part of the middle classes whose political power had been substantially enhanced by the 1832 Great Reform Bill remains a point of contention. Malthus had argued that this process could only be reversed by abolishing the poor laws tout court. However, the New Poor Law sought to achieve the same goal not by abolishing the poor laws, but rather by reforming them in such a way as to deter the able-bodied from seeking assistance—and thereby to promote character and self-reliance—by insuring that relief recipients would never be as comfortable as self-supporting laborers. This was the principle of “less eligibility.” The workhouse was the organizational cornerstone of this deterrent project in England and the means through which English reformers hoped to police the line separating dependent paupers from the independent laboring poor, whose material needs represented for the new political economy the engine behind the wealth of nations. Although outdoor or residential assistance could still be offered to the impotent poor, the New Poor Law specified that, except for medical relief, assistance to the able-bodied—who were the real target of this legislation—was to be made conditional upon entry into a workhouse, where the loss of personal freedom and subjection to a strict regimen and hard labor would deter all but the truly demoralized and impotent from relying on the assistance of others. Since unskilled workers already lived on the edge of subsistence, this deprivation of freedom, and the attendant social degradation, were seen as the only way to make the condition of paupers less eligible than that of independent workers without pushing them into outright starvation. From the perspective of those who administered the system, the workhouse had one other major advantage: since the poor themselves made the decision to apply for the workhouse rather than to survive on whatever they could obtain via the market, the permanent availability of work within the workhouse functioned as a “self-acting” test that relieved guardians from the onerous task of judging the need and character of the applicant.

The principles of deterrence were the same in Germany, though their application was organized in a rather different manner.Footnote ⁵ From the end of the Napoleonic wars into the 1850s, the social problem in the Germanies was also defined in terms of pauperism and the development of a lower-class “culture” that was viewed as the very antithesis of the habits and values of bourgeois civil society. In 1842–1843, Prussia carried out a comprehensive reform of its poor relief, settlement, vagrancy, and citizenship laws to promote labor mobility and economic development, and its so-called “relief residence system” was taken over by the Empire after unification in 1870–1871. However, this legislation left the substantive regulation of poor relief to the federal states and local authorities.

The new paradigm of poor relief developed in Germany in response to the problems of early industrialization and urbanization is most closely identified with the system adopted in 1853 by the city of Elberfeld, a precocious textile center that is now part of the city of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia. Although the Elberfeld system and the passage of the 1834 New Poor Law stand at the center of the poor law histories of Germany and Britain, respectively, the two systems differed in important respects. The Elberfeld system aimed at perfecting the organization of outdoor relief, rather than abolishing it through reliance on the workhouse, and it placed a premium on the establishment of close personal bonds between poor guardians and the poor and the careful investigation of the personal circumstances of the latter, rather than on the impersonal automaticity of the workhouse. It was based on the principle that the able-bodied poor were to be encouraged in their independence by helping them find work, rather than pauperizing them through charity, and the basic mechanism for the individualization of assistance—the systematic, intensive, and continuous investigation of the personal circumstances of each applicant for assistance and the calibration of assistance based on this knowledge—was regular house visiting carried out by a substantial body of “voluntary and honorary” (ehrenamtlich) poor guardians responsible for discharging the public obligation to assist the poor.

State and local poor laws codified the deterrent nature of poor relief within the broad organizational framework provided by the Elberfeld system. Local officials were permitted to provide only an “existence minimum,” which was understood as the minimal amount of food, shelter, and medical care needed to keep a person from immediately perishing from hunger, sickness, or cold. Such assistance could only be provided on a subsidiary basis after the individual (or family) had fallen into utter destitution. Eligibility was predicated on a socially demeaning means test. Relief recipients had to agree to unannounced house visits and the moral tutelage of their social betters. And their social stigmatization was reinforced by their political disenfranchisement. All of these policies were based on the conviction that any assistance beyond this deterrent existence minimum would invariably lead the poor down the self-destructive and socially corrosive path to pauperism. They were designed to promote self-reliance by insuring that only the truly deserving poor could survive outside of the labor market and the workhouse, which survived in Germany as a flanking measure for its system of outdoor relief and public visiting.

In England, the workhouse regime envisioned by the New Poor Law had not been applied in a rigorous, uniform manner in the years after 1834, and in 1869–1871 the national administrators responsible for supervising local poor law authorities began a crusade against the continued use of outdoor relief while for the first time extending the workhouse policy to women.Footnote ⁶ However, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a number of social programs were established in both countries outside the narrow confines of the poor laws to combat those forms of need which could not, or could no longer, be reduced to pauperism and individual immorality. In Germany these included migrant relief (Wandererfürsorge) programs, labor colonies, emergency work programs, and labor exchanges, as well as infant and tuberculosis welfare centers and maternal advice offices, all of which mushroomed during these years. New techniques of social work and guardianship were also developed to monitor the health and general well-being of infants and young children, and these years also saw the first systematic development of school meal and medical examination programs. These programs for infants and young children were complemented by correctional education programs, juvenile courts, and new forms of social work to combat the perceived increase in delinquency and juvenile criminality. These contradictory developments provided the background for the debates over the break-up of the poor laws in both Britain and Germany.Footnote ⁷

Since the goals of deterrence had been defined in relation to the prevailing understanding of the social problem as one of pauperism and demoralization, rather than material destitution, preventive social welfare programs could not but be seen as a foreign element in such systems, and as an affront to their fundamental principles. The realization of the preventive project also represented a direct challenge to the liberal view of the state because it required much greater latitude for intervening into the private sphere than could be sanctioned by classical liberalism. The task of Progressive reformers was to provide the missing theoretical rationale for these programs, and, as we shall see, this expanded sphere of public social intervention was ultimately justified in terms of a Progressive theory of solidarist social citizenship.

GERMANY AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

What appears in the recent literature as the distinguishing feature of the broad pan-Atlantic Progressive movement was the belief that liberty had to be understood less in terms of the freedom of isolated individuals to pursue their particular urges and interests than as the progressive perfection of the higher self. This was then combined with a strong conception of the interdependency of all individuals within the social body to arrive at an organic view of the relation between the individual and society whose corollary was that the pursuit of one's own freedom necessarily entailed a positive, collective obligation to create the social and environmental conditions for the self-perfection of the other members of the community.Footnote ⁸ The issue on which this ecumenical reform movement irreparably fractured was that of how best to achieve these goals. Here, the scholarly literature has focused on how the different participants in this transatlantic reform movement—which embraced not only those who explicitly identified themselves as Progressives, but also Fabians, British New Liberals, French solidaristes, and reformist Social Democrats—could draw antithetical conclusions from shared principles.

Although much has been written about social liberalism, left liberalism, and bürgerliche Sozialreform in Germany, Progressivism has been largely absent from the historiographical landscape of the Kaiserreich.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, James Kloppenberg argued, “the most striking feature of progressivism in Germany is its absence.”Footnote ¹⁰ Although this claim was a wonderful rhetorical gambit, its analytic value has been substantially diminished by subsequent research on social reform in Germany.Footnote ¹¹

Who were the German Progressives? In his important study, Kevin Repp has argued that the Progressive reform community of the Wilhelmine years was unified not by common economic interests or loyalty to a particular party, but rather by a shared habitus that was reproduced through a set of networks, institutions, and discursive practices that Repp traces across the entire social landscape of the period. The center of gravity of this habitus was the social question, and it was structured through a matrix of beliefs and attitudes that should be familiar to students of any of the national varieties of Progressivism: “concerns for the impact of capitalism and industrialization, the purposive application of modern science and technology, the need for social order and efficiency, the creation of an integral national community, the maintenance of humanistic values, and a predilection for organicist models of development and synthesis.”Footnote ¹² While Detlev Peukert's seminal Limits of Social Discipline emphasized how the negative, disciplinary potential latent within the Progressive project was increasingly radicalized by the encounter with the limits of social pedagogy, Repp argues that Progressive social politics was moderate, evolutionary, and optimistically committed to humanist values. The novel dimension of Repp's work lies in his suggestion that the members of this Progressive reform milieu also shared a specific political style: an “anti-politics” that largely eschewed party political engagement in favor of social and cultural reform. This strategy, Repp suggests, rendered invisible to subsequent historiography the broad array of initiatives undertaken by these reformers and thus facilitated the oft-repeated yet fundamentally false pessimistic assessment of the achievements of Progressive social reformers from the 1890s onward.

The literature on American Progressivism has emphasized how the rise of big business led to the colonization of political life by social issues, the dissolution of traditional party loyalties, and the subsequent emergence of a number of extra-parliamentary, single-issue movements.Footnote ¹³ One can, I believe, make a similar argument for Wilhelmine Germany, where Progressive anti-politics took the form of a steadily widening spiral of pragmatically experimental social programs and reform movements designed to combat the infinitely diverse manifestations of the social question. Although each of these initiatives was resolutely modern in its own way, they could not be integrated into a single vision of modernity. Nor could German Progressivism be reduced to a fixed, static set of doctrines and positions. It is this incommensurability between the aims of Progressive reform and the infinity of practical means through which these ends were pursued that account for the contradictoriness and volatility—or, in more positive terms, the openness and pragmatism—of the Progressive movement.

Repp staked out broadly the boundaries of the Progressive reform milieu, and the welfare reformers examined in the pages that follow represented a subset within this. A number of the persons who played central roles in articulating the rationale for the new preventive social welfare were associated with the Institute for the Common Welfare (Institut für Gemeinwohl), a social reform think tank founded in 1890 by the Frankfurt industrialist Wilhelm Merton, and its spin-off, the Central Bureau for Private Welfare (Centrale für private Fürsorge), which combined theorizing about the reform of poor relief and charity with the coordination of voluntary agencies in the city. The key figures here are Christian Jasper Klumker, who later became the first professor of social welfare in Germany, Othmar Spann, who ultimately became an influential theorist of corporatism and Austro-fascism, and Wilhelm Polligkeit, whose later position as secretary of the German Association for Poor Relief and Charity made him into the most influential German social welfare expert in the 1920s.

The turn of the century was also the age of imperialism, and much of the impetus for the reform of poor relief and charity came from the linkage between the national and the social questions.Footnote ¹⁴ In many cases, the understanding of this connection had been shaped through university study with the leading figures of the Historical School of national economics or through membership in the Society for Ethical Culture. These decades also saw the growth of a new group of “social managers,” who sought to channel and organize the irresistible forces of modernity in order to create a more dynamic, productive, and orderly society and a strong state capable of asserting German interests in the international sphere.Footnote ¹⁵ These were the lawyers, economists, urban planners, and public health experts who oversaw the expansion, rationalization, and professionalization of municipal social services—including poor relief—as the cities sought to respond to the challenges of urbanization and industrialization.

Friedrich Naumann's National Social Association sought to wed the idea of social integration to the search for national efficiency. Klumker and Gertrude Bäumer, the long-time leader of the German women's movement, as well as a number of other individuals, all came to social work through the national social movement. But the bourgeois women's movement itself also tried to bring about a similar synthesis. The women's movement saw its goal as that of social reconciliation through the personal expiation of class guilt on the basis of a gendered, solidarist, “social world view.” From the turn of the century to the end of World War I, women social workers viewed themselves as the quintessential agents of an optimistic modernity. They were among the earliest advocates of preventive social pedagogy. And there were numerous personal and political connections between the women's movement, the social work profession, and the left liberal parties. Moreover, not only was there a lively flow of reform ideas across the Atlantic, as Daniel Rodgers has argued, but German reformers also had numerous direct contacts with their British counterparts. Bäumer, for example, made several trips to England, and Alice Salomon, the dominant figure in the women's social work movement after the turn of the century, had been personally acquainted with Beatrice Webb since 1899.

Liberal municipal politicians were also one of the pillars of the Progressive reform milieu. State suffrage laws insured that the liberal parties would enjoy much greater influence at the local than the national level, and liberals dominated urban politics in most cities throughout the Empire. While social reform was to a large degree blocked at the national level after the mid-1890s, the constitutional structure of the Empire gave the cities the freedom to experiment in those domains that lay within their legislative competence. Virtually all of the preventive social welfare programs created during these years were the product of initiatives undertaken at the local level either by voluntary associations acting on their own or by local government acting in conjunction with such associations outside the restrictive scope of the poor laws. Of course, their ability to pursue such policies depended on the constellation of local political forces, and the understanding of the social problem held by many of the reformers who will figure in the following pages was shaped by their experience as social administrators in the towns of southwestern Germany, where the relations between (left) liberalism and Social Democracy were more collaborative than in the industrial centers of Prussia, where the scope for Progressive social reform initiatives was much more limited.

Lastly, from its founding in 1880–1881 through the end of the Weimar Republic, the German Association for Poor Relief and Charity was the most important organization in the field of poor relief and charity proper. The Association, which was originally founded to promote the rationalization of poor relief and the spread of scientific charity, was half think tank and half interest group. Its membership included a broad spectrum of opinion, including the church charities, though liberal municipal politicians (both National Liberal and left liberal) represented its core constituency. Every major issue in the broad domain of poor relief, charity, and welfare was a topic of discussion at one or more of its annual conferences, and the following account will draw extensively on this material.

THE BREAK-UP OF THE POOR LAWS—BRITISH STYLE

The considerations that in December 1905 led the outgoing administration of Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour to appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the operation of the poor laws and consider the appropriate mechanisms for meeting the needs of the unemployed remain a matter of speculation. What is clear is that this Commission catalyzed a three-way debate over the relation between deterrence and prevention that was immediately recognized as a watershed that would forever undermine what had long been understood as the principles of the 1834 New Poor Law.Footnote ¹⁶

The first persons to give evidence before the Commission were the chief of the Poor Law Division of the Local Government Board and a number of his subordinate inspectors. These officials uniformly advocated what was known at the time as a “strict” interpretation of the poor laws. That is, they condemned the tendency to provide more generous levels of assistance to those deemed more deserving, to provide such assistance outside the workhouse, and to remove certain categories of persons from the poor laws altogether and provide them with benefits through other, non-discriminatory programs. They called instead for a systematic return to the principle of less eligibility as embodied in the workhouse, which they believed to have been the central innovation of the 1834 poor law. Nevertheless, despite, and because of, the historical inaccuracy of this account, this strict interpretation immediately became the primary point of reference for the Commission's subsequent work.

The most prominent protagonists of the positions that would be codified in the Majority and Minority reports—Helen Bosanquet and Beatrice Webb, respectively—largely agreed on how assistance would have to be reorganized to eliminate the problems of waste and demoralization identified by the strict interpreters. Most notably, and quite unexpectedly, both reports rejected the call for a return to the ostensible principles of 1834 and argued, instead, that the mission of public assistance would henceforth have to be the prevention and cure of need, rather than simply the relief of destitution. The catch was that, although both reports favored prevention and curative treatment, each held very different views on the relation of character and environment as the cause of need, and consequently they understood prevention and cure in quite different ways.

In his commentary on the Majority Report, the Idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet (and husband of Helen Bosanquet) portrayed need as a problem of character whose solution could only be found in the moral domain. Already in 1895, he had written, “Circumstance is modifiable by character, and so far as circumstance is a name for human action, by character alone…. [T]he disposition of the mind as a whole is the determining condition of all conditions.”Footnote ¹⁷ In practice, this led him to locate the ultimate cause of distress in the “failure of citizen character,” which manifested itself most clearly in the inability of the individual to maintain himself and his dependents.Footnote ¹⁸ From this perspective, prevention meant not social reform or environmental change, but rather anything that might tend to restore or strengthen the overall capacity for self-maintenance. Although the poverty of an individual or family had many dimensions, Bosanquet insisted that these were all nothing other than surface manifestations of this underlying characterological cause.Footnote ¹⁹

This emphasis on the centrality of moral uplift or moral reform in preventing poverty was not entirely novel. The question, though, was how this change of character was to be effected if one abandoned the material hardship that had long been regarded as the essence of nineteenth-century deterrence. Bosanquet argued that the rise in the overall standard of living since the 1830s had made it possible to develop new methods for promoting self-reliance. Under these changed circumstances, he suggested, integrated, family-based casework could achieve the same effect by insuring a close linkage between the receipt of public assistance and the willingness of recipients to take greater responsibility for their own support.Footnote ²⁰

The Majority Report was also unexpectedly revolutionary in its proposal to establish Voluntary Aid Committees in every county or borough. According to the Report, the poor would be required to apply first to these Committees in case of need in the expectation that the voluntary agencies active in the locale would be able to assist virtually all applicants just as well as, if not better than, public agencies. The latter would only be permitted to assist applicants in a manner “less agreeable” than what the Voluntary Aid Committee was willing to provide. This proposal would have reduced statutory poor relief to a vestigial role, though, as the Webbs noted, it was unclear whether this proposal represented a reversion to the voluntarist schemes of Thomas Chalmers or an attempt to give unprecedented statutory authority to voluntary charity.Footnote ²¹ In either case, the realization of this proposal would have amounted in its own way to a break-up of the poor laws.

The Bosanquets had argued that the common failure of self-support justified treating the dependent as a distinct social group and applying the method of casework to remedy the characterological deficiency that set them apart. In contrast, the Webbs mocked the idea of an undifferentiated “pauper host” and denied that the mere fact of destitution provided an adequate basis for the organization of social intervention.Footnote ²² “What is demanded by conditions,” they maintained, “is not a division according to the presence or absence of destitution, but a division according to the service to be provided.”Footnote ²³ This statement, which referred to their belief that need was due to a variety of social and environmental causes, rather than the single fact of character failure, amounted to a rejection—implicit, but nonetheless clear—of the Bosanquets' equation of the social question with the failure of citizen character. The Webbs later made this point in more explicit terms when they wrote that, although “individuals in all sections of the destitute may be morally defective, and this in all sorts of different ways, the great mass of destitution is the direct and … almost inevitable result of the environment.”Footnote ²⁴ However, this emphasis on environmental causes did not make them into either narrow materialists or unreconstructed collectivists because they saw expanded public social intervention as an indispensable means for securing individual freedom and promoting the perfection of the individual character. As Sidney Webb wrote in 1910, “Instead of restricting public action to the provision, under deterrent conditions, of the mere relief of destitution, we see the State taking upon itself, for one section after another, more and more of active interference with the environment of the individual; and creating for this purpose a whole series of special organs unconnected with the Poor Law. It seeks to prevent the occurrence of what is deemed detrimental; it seeks to restrain the creation of circumstances adverse to individual development; it seeks to promote social conditions judged likely to result in favourable growth.”Footnote ²⁵ From this perspective, prevention did not so much entail leading the dependent poor toward self-support as providing individuals who presumptively adhered to this norm with the material and cultural resources needed to live in accordance with their beliefs.

The Webbs reiterated these ideas in the concluding chapter of The Prevention of Destitution, which is perhaps the classic statement of the moral economy of Progressive poor law reform. Here, they argued that it was poverty itself and the sense of helplessness to which it gave rise that corroded individual character and that measures to prevent poverty did not undermine the self-reliance of the recipient and weaken the family (as liberal critics had long argued). Rather, such measures strengthened needy individuals by giving them a degree of control over their lives that had been taken away by social forces beyond their control. But they also went beyond this criticism of deterrence. They inverted its moral logic to argue that the real moral failure was most often not that of the needy individual, but rather that of the community, which, instead of taking systematic preventive action, insisted on “relieving” the poor in a way that left them to vegetate in their misery while financially subsidizing those social ills (sweated work, causal labor, unsanitary living and working conditions, etc.) that were the underlying causes of their poverty.Footnote ²⁶

These arguments embodied a conceptual judo throw that made expanded public intervention, which liberals had long regarded as a threat to individual freedom, into the condition of its realization.Footnote ²⁷ This paradigm shift, so to speak, and the plan for the break-up of the poor laws that it implied were based on both a distinctly Fabian (or at least Webbian) rethinking of the rights and duties of both the individual and the state and a specific reading of English poor law history. Both of these ideas appear to have crystallized in the course of the Commission's work. One key to this new approach was the insight into what a coherent alternative to deterrence might look like. This seems to have come to Beatrice Webb as something of an epiphany. As she wrote in her diary, when listening to evidence provided by Charity Organization Society members in favor of restricting medical relief to the destitute, “It suddenly flashed across my mind that what we had to do was to adopt the exactly contrary attitude, and make medical inspection and medical treatment compulsory on all sick persons—to treat illness, in fact, as a Public Nuisance to be suppressed in the interests of the community.”Footnote ²⁸ Such an approach would have involved seeking out incipient illness and treating it long before it had resulted in irreparable damage to the health, productivity, and general well-being of the individual. This passage also hints at the second crucial factor underlying this shift in their thinking: the need for a coherent rationale as to why deterrence should be rejected in favor of the preventive idea. While preventive intervention had been unthinkable in the past for fear that positive state action would undermine the self-reliance of the poor, in the passage just cited Beatrice Webb argued that such intervention should be based on an assessment of whether it would be good for the community to eliminate a potential nuisance. Her suggestion that individual social rights should be expanded for the sake of the nation was complemented by her husband's insistence (cited above) that such intervention also represented an equally necessary condition for the self-realization of the individual. It was the resulting willingness to give greater weight to the potential benefits of such assistance to the individual and the nation, rather than to its potential moral hazards that ultimately drove the Webbs down the path to systematic prevention and cure.

The Webbs argued that this plan involved less a radical break with British tradition than the systematic continuation tendencies that had been underway for the previous three decades. Just as the establishment of free public schooling had eliminated the need for a separate system of poor law schools for the children of the destitute, they argued, so too had the development of a broad spectrum of preventive programs for the necessitous population outside the poor laws—as in Germany—rendered superfluous the entire range of poor law services directed exclusively at the destitute.Footnote ²⁹ On this basis, the Minority plan for the break-up of the poor law called for the abolition of the entire poor law administration and the consolidation of these redundant poor law services for the destitute in the hands of five local government commissions responsible for providing preventive, curative programs to all necessitous persons according to the nature of their specific needs: (1) children, (2) the sick, (3) the insane, (4) the elderly, and (5) the unemployed.

But if preventive social services were not to be limited to the destitute, exactly who, then, would be eligible for such assistance? The Minority Report argued that public social services should be open to anyone who lived under “conditions which, without the intervention of the Public Authority, would produce consequences inimical to the common weal.” These conditions might include material destitution, but the Webbs gave the term a new register of meanings when they suggested that such services should also be extended to children who were “destitute” of education or proper parental care, sick persons who were “destitute” of proper treatment, and so on (though these persons could also be charged in proportion to their ability to pay).Footnote ³⁰ However, this idea of allowing the scope of the new public assistance to be determined by the logic of prevention did not address the questions of how much or what kinds of assistance were to be provided. The Webbs had first advocated the idea of a national minimum in 1897, but it was not until their confrontation with both the Bosanquets and the defenders of the strict interpretation of the poor laws that it definitively supplanted destitution as the standard of public assistance in their thinking. In the Minority Report they suggested that, following the conclusions of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, public agencies should be obligated to secure “the reasonable necessaries of life, such as food, lodging, warmth, clothing and medical attendance according to the normal standard of the times.” Although this “normal standard” did not imply unlimited obligations with regard to every manifestation of need, it was one that was rising in accordance with the income and lifestyle of the laboring classes, and the Webbs argued that there was substantial room to elevate the level of public assistance since current social spending represented a much smaller proportion of the nation's annual income than it had in the early 1800s.Footnote ³¹

Regardless of whether these expanded social services were justified in terms of the welfare of the individual or that of the nation, they came with strings attached. On the one hand, this new solidarist conception of social citizenship implied that the community had positive obligations towards the individual that were inconceivable for classical liberalism. As Sidney Webb explained, “The universal maintenance of a definite minimum standard of civilization and the progressive elevation of that minimum is regarded as the joint responsibility of an indissoluble partnership. The community, far from washing its hands of the individual,” as was the case in the age of deterrence, “finds itself forced, in the interests of the community as a whole, to assume definite duties with regard to him.”Footnote ³² On the other hand, the correlate of these expanded social rights was an expanded right on the part of the community to compel those citizens whose wanton refusal of assistance made them into a danger to both themselves and the community to act in a more responsible manner.Footnote ³³

As a result, the Webbs were critical of poor relief because it did not provide any incentive for preventive action or allow for sufficient control over those persons whose failure to live up to their social obligations endangered or burdened the community. They felt poor relief was wasteful of human and financial resources to the extent that it failed to establish a dynamic, synergistic relation between benefits and social obligations. “It is of the essence,” they wrote, “of any mere relief of destitution, confined as it is to those who are destitute, at the period of their destitution, that it is necessarily precluded from bringing to bear upon those whom it relieves, either moral suasion and preventive influences prior to the crisis of destitution, when alone they can be of real avail, or the indispensable disciplinary supervision after the crisis has passed.”Footnote ³⁴ Although the Webbs shared these concerns with their Progressive counterparts in Germany, they took them to a much higher level. As a result, coercive institutions for the policing of slackers (especially labor colonies and their idea of “maintenance under training” for the jobless) played a much more integral role in their vision of reformed social assistance than did the corresponding efforts of German relief officials to secure authority for the administrative detention of deadbeat dads, idlers, and loose women. The Webbs' willingness to follow the logic of social obligations opened them to criticism both at the time and since. But their concern with social slackers was one they shared not with the proponents of a strict interpretation of the poor laws, but rather with the Bosanquets (who, as we have seen, addressed this issue in terms of the conditionality of individual charity, even though they were critical of what they regarded as a cradle-to-grave system of state tutelage that was guaranteed to render the individual unfit for self-maintenance and active citizenship).Footnote ³⁵ The challenge here was, as Stefan Collini has argued with respect to Leonard Hobhouse, to mobilize the liberal belief in the moral right to individual development against the economic individualism of the liberal tradition without allowing the emphasis on social obligations to completely absorb or submerge the right to self-determination that the new social rights were intended to make possible.Footnote ³⁶

Andrew Vincent is probably correct in arguing that the idea of social or environmental influence on individual character was latent in Bernard Bosanquet's Idealist theory of subjectivity as a theoretical possibility that was never explicitly developed or reflected upon,Footnote ³⁷ and it is certain that the development of character and personality is the telos of the Webbs' entire theory of environmental causality. As they wrote in the concluding chapter of The Prevention of Destitution (titled “The Moral Factor”), “However much we may better the material circumstances of a family, a class or a generation, if in doing so we have lessened the energy, lowered the intellectual standard or degraded the motives of those concerned, or of the community as a whole, we shall have achieved naught and less than naught … . The whole ‘moral’ effect of the work of the preventive Authorities is, in fact, in the opposite direction, tending always to increase the consciousness of obligation, and to promote a more extensive fulfillment of it.”Footnote ³⁸

This argumentation is a perfect example of the chiasmic structure of both the broader Progressive movement and its historiography. Here, personality and individual freedom are revealed to be the “truth” or telos of a social theory whose emphasis on environmental reform and collective action are normally taken as evidence of a disregard for such values. The important point, though, is that the idea of prevention and the new set of social rights and obligations that the Webbs constructed in order to justify expanded public social services were two inseparable elements of a new assistantial paradigm. In the next section I will argue that both the conception of social citizenship articulated by the Webbs and the rationale that they offered for the break-up of the poor laws were virtually identical to those developed by German Progressives.

THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF POOR RELIEF

Some years ago, Pat Thane wrote, “The important role of voluntarism in nineteenth-century Britain was not the fortuitous corollary of the limited state but integral to the conceptualization of that state by its leaders.” In Britain, she continued, the corollary of the limited state was a commitment to the “active participation by citizens in the activities of the state, a means whereby they justified their political and social rights through the exercise of responsibilities toward their fellow citizens.” However, though Thane did not make the point, it should also be noted that voluntarism's appeal was due as much to this notion of active citizenship as to the belief that personal contact between rich and poor was peculiarly suited to combating the social problem as it was understood across much of the nineteenth century, that is, as a problem of individual character.Footnote ³⁹ This combination of “providence, paternalism and philanthropy”Footnote ⁴⁰ within the framework of the limited state also defined the political rationality of public assistance in Germany from the Vormärz until the end of the century.

At the turn of the century, though, a number of forces came together to call into question every element of this liberal, voluntarist paradigm. Although voluntarism was weakened by the rationalization, bureaucratization, and professionalization of poor relief and charity, the broad acceptance of a social perspective on poverty redefined the nature of public responsibility in the social sector in ways that called into question the very legitimacy of nineteenth-century voluntarism. This was an age in which political organization by the working classes was enabling them to assert more effectively their own interests in the public sphere. In conjunction with this new democratic spirit, the idea that need was due more to the structural inequalities of the bourgeois social order and to the environmentally conditioned inability to meet the norms of social fitness than to individual character failings appeared to a growing number of observers to imply that these disadvantaged persons should enjoy more explicit rights to social services that would not simply keep them from starving, but that would also allow them to better realize their own potential and enjoy the rights and duties associated with political citizenship. This logic of prevention and social citizenship was incompatible with the logic of deterrence and social marginalization, and it was far from clear whether these new demands could be met through voluntary action or whether it was even appropriate to rely upon voluntary associations to discharge this public obligation.

These issues were systematically addressed in Germany under the rubric of the social evolution of poor relief, which was the topic of the 1901 and 1905 conferences of the German Association for Poor Relief and Charity. At the 1901 conference, Frankfurt city councilor Karl Flesch, one of the leading liberal experts on poor relief and social policy legislation, laid out what might be called the liberal view of the future of poor relief. According to Flesch, in the bourgeois era all individuals had to rely on work, property, and the family to meet their basic needs. The purpose of poor relief was to step in when these mechanisms of private reproduction failed, and Flesch insisted that the only way to preserve these institutions while meeting the needs of society's more unfortunate members was to provide only a minimal level of assistance and to do so in an individualizing, discriminatory, and subsidiary manner. In view of these manifest limits of individualizing poor relief, Flesch argued that the best hope for social progress was social policy legislation, which alone could strengthen the position of the working classes in the labor market and thus roll back class poverty without weakening the basic institutions of bourgeois society.

From this perspective, then, the evolution of poor relief in the direction of social rights to preventive social welfare was self-contradictory and ill advised. Not only would such a development undermine the very institutions it was intended to support, but it would also involve an open-ended financial commitment that no society could make. No city could afford, Flesch argued, to provide every person who had only a rudimentary dwelling, or perhaps no shelter at all, with a home that adequately satisfied both the needs of the family and the standards of modern cultural life, rather than the minimal housing required by the poor laws. The cost would be infinite and the danger of demoralization imminent.

This was a powerful liberal vision of social reform, one that would have brought about the gradual withering away of poor relief through the expansion of social policy legislation without altering the existing system in any significant way. This did not mean that there was no place for prevention, however. Flesch argued that, instead of asking poor relief to do something that contradicted its basic principles, relief officials should encourage the formation of voluntary associations to serve as the agents of preventive social welfare. In contrast to statutory programs, voluntary programs could more easily discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving and maintain a proper balance between the services they provided and available resources. Drawing on the legal theorist Rudolf Ihering, Flesch envisioned a progression leading from concerned individuals via these voluntary associations to the state. To the extent that these preventive programs achieved general recognition, they would be institutionalized in state social policy legislation, but they would not become an accretion to a poor relief system that was based on completely different principles.Footnote ⁴¹

Flesch's arguments here illustrate the precise sense in which voluntarism was, as Thane noted, integral to the liberal state. The expectation that active citizens would respond to those needs whose urgency was publicly recognized, but which lay beyond the proper scope of state activity, was the logical correlate to the minimalist, deterrent scope of state activity. This understanding of the relation between state and association should also make us wary of the approach of modern analysts of the third or non-profit sector, who categorize associations according to whether they supplement the state, collaborate with it, or contest it through advocacy. As we can see from Flesch's account of the relation of philanthropic associations to poor relief in bourgeois society, it lay in their very essence that they shared in all three moments: they supplemented a state that in good conscience could not make open-ended commitments to preventive social services; they collaborated with state officials who valued the preventive programs they offered and therefore provided subsidies and other assistance outside the framework of the poor law; and they advocated on behalf of social policy legislation that would institutionalize these programs.

If it were simply a question of proposing better benefits for the deserving poor, then the debate over the social evolution of poor relief would not be worth such sustained attention. However, the 1905 debate moved in a more radical direction to argue that public assistance should be altered to enable it to secure the social rights of citizenship in the very way that Flesch said it could not. The leading proponents of the social evolution of poor relief at the 1905 conference were Strassburg mayor Rudolf Schwander and Adolf Buehl, the director of the Hamburg poor relief administration, who laid out the Progressive approach.Footnote ⁴² For Schwander, the purpose of public assistance was to fill the gaps in the existing economic system and step in wherever its regular operation did not permit the individual to satisfy his or her basic needs through work, property, or family. Schwander argued that, since most cases of need could, in fact, be traced back to failures of the economic system outside the control of the individual, it only seemed reasonable that these persons should be granted a “right to assistance” or a “right to existence.”Footnote ⁴³ Such a right was, in Buehl's words, the correlate of the “social obligation” the community owed to those members who were systematically disadvantaged by the functioning of its most basic institutions.Footnote ⁴⁴

Schwander insisted that responsibility for discharging this public obligation should be placed in the hands of a public agency, rather than being regarded as a matter of secondary importance that could comfortably be left to the arbitrary discretion of voluntary associations. Accordingly, he called for the revision of existing electoral laws because he felt that the deterrent loss of suffrage rights was inconsistent with his understanding of the causes of poverty and his vision of social citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁵ Using the recent history of school meals, youth welfare, and social hygiene programs as examples, Buehl argued in a manner analogous to that of the Minority Report that eligibility for preventive services should be cut loose from poor law definitions of need and made available without distinction to a much broader group of needy persons. By this, he appears to have meant all of those persons whose culture and way of life could not conform to the standards of modern hygiene and culture without such assistance, though he was never explicit on this point. Schwander and Buehl justified their call for the entitlement to an expanded spectrum of preventive social welfare programs by playing on the slippage between political citizenship and socio-economic disadvantage. Salomon, on the other hand, argued that the aim and limits of statutory public assistance had to be determined from a perspective that was different from that which had informed deterrent relief—that is, one that considered what was necessary “from the standpoint of the national welfare, from the standpoint of the health, strength and morality of the nation.” From this perspective, she argued, prevention was a necessary, productive investment in the nation's human capital.Footnote ⁴⁶

This generalization of preventive social welfare to all needy citizens on a nondiscriminatory basis simply by virtue of their membership in the community is what Schwander and Buehl had in mind when they spoke of the social evolution of poor relief. This Progressive position differed from the liberal position marked out by Flesch in that it placed the blame for poverty squarely on the systematic inequalities of bourgeois society, rather than the failures of individual character; it inferred from the failings of the economic system the existence of individual social rights and public social obligations; and it charged the community with taking direct action to remedy class poverty rather than being content to work indirectly through the impact of social policy on the market. It differed from socialism in that it sought to use public assistance to compensate for structural inequalities within the capitalist system rather than calling for its overthrow. This logic doubly marginalized the voluntary sector. On one hand, it was clearly impossible to solve the problem of structural, class poverty through the individualizing, discriminatory methods common to poor relief and charity, and the voluntary sector in any case lacked the resources necessary to assist an entire social class. On the other hand, once it was recognized that the public owed these obligations to all members of the disadvantaged classes, the fragmentary, incomplete, and provisional character of voluntary programs came to be seen as decisive disadvantages that easily outweighed their pioneering function. The need to insure the comprehensive, systematic satisfaction of this public obligation thus seemed to demand that public agencies had to have primary responsibility for discharging this obligation. This turn is what was meant by the term “collectivism,” or at least collectivism in a certain sense, for the question of communal control of private property and industry, to which this term normally refers, remained entirely beyond the horizon of this debate. Nevertheless, this proposal was the exact inversion of the liberal, voluntarist, deterrent paradigm described at the beginning of this section.Footnote ⁴⁷

In Germany, this Progressive vision of the social evolution of poor relief was a minority position, and it corresponded only unevenly with actual relief practice during the first five years of the century. A 1905 survey showed that in a number of areas (including levels of monetary assistance and the expansion of the existence minimum to include sanatorium treatment, education, and school meals) the actual practice of many cities had not gone nearly as far as was permitted by existing legislation. The authors of the survey concluded that the most that one could discern was a tendency for relief authorities to provide these preventive programs, and they pointed out that this trend could never become universal without a fundamental transformation of the principles of poor relief, something hardly likely in the foreseeable future given the many cities that were hostile, or at best indifferent, toward the social evolution of poor relief. But the authors of the survey did qualify this gloomy picture in one important respect, noting that one reason so many relief authorities did not feel a need to expand their own work was that they were already supported by voluntary associations that had assumed responsibility, as best they could, for public obligations in the field of preventive social welfare.Footnote ⁴⁸

The German reception of the Majority and Minority reports was equally contradictory. Since the mid-1800s, the Germans and the British had been careful observers of each other's approach to poor relief and charity.Footnote ⁴⁹ The German system of public visiting through the Elberfeld system and the British reliance on paid relief administrators and (in theory at least) indoor relief via the workhouse reflected important differences in political culture. They created forms of path dependency that limited the potential influence of the one national system on the other. But that reformers in both countries were feeling their way beyond deterrence created a political and intellectual space that transcended national traditions. The most systematic German assessment of work of the Royal Commission came from Emil Münsterberg, the director of the Berlin poor relief authority and chair of the German Association for Poor Relief and Charity (who himself appeared as a foreign expert before the Commission). Most striking about Münsterberg's thinking here is an ambivalence that is tantamount to self-contradiction.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the one hand, he was deeply impressed by the theoretical power and empirical richness of the Minority Report, which made it, in his opinion, the best single thing that had ever been written on poor relief, and by its “social” spirit, which he thought represented the way of the future. By comparison, the Majority Report cut a poor figure, representing not a revolutionary attempt to move beyond poor relief and deterrence, but an evolutionary tinkering designed simply to improve administrative practice. On the other hand, while this social approach to poor relief and joblessness (the dual charge of the Royal Commission) gave the Minority Report its dynamic thrust, Münsterberg also argued that it gave the Webbs' proposals a utopian character (in the derogatory sense) that carried them entirely outside the bounds of what was necessary or possible for the improvement of poor relief, in the specific sense of the term. For example, Münsterberg could claim that the Webbs' concern with preventing juvenile delinquency and curing it through pedagogical intervention represented an important step forward, but in the same sentence insist that these preventive programs could not be completely separated from deterrent poor relief, with all of the limitations that this entailed. The same schizophrenia is evident in his account of the Webbs' proposals for dealing with unemployment-related poverty. Although Münsterberg recognized that their social perspective had enabled them to grasp the rootedness of poverty in joblessness in a more radical manner than anyone who saw the problem primarily as one of rationalizing assistance for individuals who lacked a strong work ethic or sense of family responsibility, he nevertheless insisted that assistance to the unemployed could not be completely separated from deterrent poor relief without creating new sources of poverty and vagrancy. Despite the theoretical modesty of the Majority Report, Münsterberg argued that it provided the better roadmap for making all of those improvements in relief practice for which there was space within existing legal and political constraints. Münsterberg subscribed in varying degrees to many of the criticisms others had leveled against the Webbs' scheme for breaking up the poor laws, for example, the insinuation that the various committees would undermine the family and the claim that the Webbs' proposals for dealing with slackers were too coercive. Nevertheless, he continued to oscillate between seeing the Minority Report as a concrete utopia whose time had not yet come and as an ill-considered utopia whose time could never come.Footnote ⁵¹

This debate among welfare experts did not directly lead to any important changes in the organization of assistance—nor should such an outcome have been expected. Opinion, as we have seen, was divided; assistantial practice was largely shaped by the balance of political power at the local level; and the German government was clearly opposed to any further movement on the social reform front (though the Reichstag did take one important step to codify the principle of prevention by removing the suffrage disabilities associated with the receipt of several broad categories of preventive social welfare). The outcome was no different in Britain. There, divisions within the Royal Commission left the Liberal Asquith government (and subsequent administrations) free to pursue their own agendas while the poor laws themselves remained largely unchanged until World War II.

THE END OF POOR RELIEF AND THE BIRTH OF THE WELFARE STATE

While some cities were aggressively pursuing Progressive reforms in the immediate pre-war years, many others were noticeably unenthusiastic, and in 1914 there was no obvious single path along which social policy could have been expected to evolve at either the local or the national levels. However, the outbreak of World War I fundamentally changed the rules of the relief game. Just as the totalization of war broke down the barriers between military and society, the need to mobilize society behind the war brought about a broad inversion of the political calculus of nineteenth-century deterrence and endowed preventive social welfare programs with a national, military, and social significance that largely overrode the reservations that had limited their acceptance in the pre-war years.

The displacement of deterrent poor relief from its privileged position in Germany was also accelerated by the rapid expansion of wartime assistance programs, which were based on completely different principles. The foundation of wartime welfare was the separation allowances paid to the dependents of men serving in the military.Footnote ⁵² Their purpose was to insure that “the resolve of the family breadwinner, who stands before the enemy, is not diminished by the fear that his dependents are not being adequately cared for” and to facilitate the maintenance of an “orderly household.” These separation allowances were to be entirely independent of poor relief and entail none of the disabilities associated with public assistance. The social dimension of the law—that is, the subordination of the traditional emphasis on combating dependency to the maintenance of the income and standard of living of the recipients—was reflected in the way need was to be determined, and government decrees repeatedly explained to local officials that they were to take a flexible and generous attitude in determining eligibility for such assistance.Footnote ⁵³

These same principles informed the other main form of wartime social assistance. Already in August 1914, the Reich Interior Minister issued a decree requiring local government to set up wartime welfare programs for “all persons who have need of assistance because of the war.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This assistance was not to entail any of the legal disabilities of poor relief or to be limited to the existence minimum employed by poor relief. The goal of these programs was to combat the churning of class structures and preserve the standard of living and social position that people had occupied before the war.Footnote ⁵⁵ This new “social existence minimum” became the measure of need which local officials were obligated to relieve.Footnote ⁵⁶

In addition to these challenges to deterrent relief, the mobilization of the nation for war meant that large segments of the population came to depend on the state for their basic needs. These were people who in normal times would never have come into contact with public assistance. They could make claims upon the state in ways that the traditional poor could not, and the specific rights that would be accorded to these new poor would define the concrete meaning of citizenship in the wartime and Weimar welfare states. In addition, the increasingly total nature of the war made it virtually impossible to distinguish between the general population and those persons deserving of special privileges because of their contribution to the war. To the extent that preventive social welfare came to be seen as crucial to the long-term tasks of reconstructing the population and productivity of the nation, there was little possibility that poor relief would recover its pre-war preeminence after 1918.

Moreover, during the war, leading Progressive youth welfare reformers, who continued to develop their ideas on social citizenship, argued that society had a positive obligation to promote the fitness of all children for their multiple roles in adult life and that social programs could no longer wait until children had succumbed to some form of need before acting. As Aloys Fischer argued in his keynote address to the most important wartime youth welfare conference, youth welfare was one of the most important means by which a society insured the education and socialization of its young and thus its own reproduction. The community, he argued, must develop “a consciousness of collective responsibility [with regard to this obligation]. We must all feel and be convinced that we are all implicated in the need of every child and therefore obligated to help remedy this need… . whenever there is anywhere in the fatherland a child who is endangered or who has succumbed to such danger.” But while in previous decades this sense of collective obligation and solidarist responsibility had propelled the formation of voluntary associations, this process had now entered a new stage where this obligation was recognized by the community itself, rather than simply by concerned individuals. The transformation of this sense of social obligation from a private to a public matter meant that youth welfare work now had to make a conscious, systematic effort to secure the rights of all children because, “we can not be indifferent as to whether or not proper and sufficient measures are taken to insure the welfare of a child who is disadvantaged through no fault of his own.” The public youth welfare office and the professional guardians who staffed it were to be the institutional expression of this proactive commitment to the systematic monitoring and assistance of all potentially needy children.Footnote ⁵⁷

By the end of the war, these ideas had also moved into the mainstream of social reform thinking. One pillar of the Progressive social contract was the belief in a collective and individual obligation of society to prevent need in its diverse forms. This is what Heinrich Ruland—chair of the German Association for Poor Relief and Charity—in 1919 called a “social obligation of human society to insure the most humane existence for all its members and, therefore, to seek out in every sphere of poverty the roots of this evil and to stamp them out,” rather than waiting until people had fallen into poverty or succumbed to other forms of need before acting, as had been the case as long as social assistance was dominated by the principles of deterrence, less eligibility, and subsidiarity. The correlate of this social duty was the endowment of all citizens with social rights to that assistance necessary for them to become full members of the community, that is, to quote Ruland, “the moral right of every person who is threatened by poverty to the timely social assistance of his compatriots in order to avoid poverty, in order to insure that the endangered person remains a full member of the community and does not become dependent on the help of others.” From this perspective, it was necessary to jettison poor relief altogether, precisely because the need to relieve poverty implied the failure of society to prevent its occurrence in the first place—and replace it with a new form of assistance that better expressed the new commitment to prevention, individual social rights, solidarist social obligations, and the respect for the dignity of the needy that flowed from it.Footnote ⁵⁸ This new form of assistance was known as soziale Fürsorge, or social welfare.

The social rights enjoyed by the citizens of the new social welfare state were limited and conditional, as we saw in our discussion of the Minority Report. Within the Progressive social contract, the counterpart to both the duty of society to prevent need and the social rights of the needy to such assistance was the duty of the needy to help themselves. As Polligkeit explained, “The right to existence (Lebensunterhalt) and work, to health care and education, can not be thought without the express emphasis on the associated obligations. In fact, one can even go so far as to say that, without the express emphasis that every person is obligated—to the extent of one's ability—to earn a living through the productive employment of one's energies, to keep oneself healthy and to properly raise one's children, the guarantee of a right to assistance is unthinkable.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In their eagerness to blame the victim (who, to be sure, is not always blameless), those who argue that that all of the evils of the modern welfare state stem from its separation of entitlements from the moral obligations of social citizenship miss this key point.Footnote ⁶⁰

Although the liberal defenders of deterrent poor relief did not simply roll over and die at the end of World War I, the idea of preventive social welfare, and the Progressive political theory on which it was based, had by that time achieved a critical mass of acceptance within the social reform community, and the terms of the postwar debate were defined by the language of welfare, rather than the language of deterrence. However, political divisions and the disastrous state of public finances after 1918 prevented these ideas from being put into practice in a direct, wholesale manner. The postwar German welfare state was an unsatisfactory mixture of the preventive social welfare that had glimmered on the intellectual horizon of the prewar Progressives, a system of individualizing social assistance that gave priority to labor market reintegration, rather than social inclusion, and minimal state pension programs for some of the new poor, all of which functioned in parallel with—and often in support of—a social insurance system whose finances had been irreparably undermined by the inflation. But the foundations of the preventive social welfare programs that have—despite, if not because of, their entanglement in the contradictions of assistance and discipline—come to be seen as the hallmark of the modernity of Weimar Germany were laid by the programmatic innovations and theoretical debates of the years after 1900. To a large degree, the social legislation of the Weimar Republic simply codified these developments and inherited the tensions and conflicts associated with them.Footnote ⁶¹