The history of the German welfare state has received considerable attention over the past two decades. Much of this work has sought to engage Detlev Peukert's provocative assertion that the regimes of social discipline and reproductive control instituted by the Weimar Republic adumbrated the exclusionary social policy of the Third Reich. Recent work by Young-Sun Hong, Edward Ross Dickinson, and Michelle Mouton, among others, has taken issue with this rather one-sided Foucauldian approach, encouraging us not to underestimate the essentially inclusive, humanist, progressive elements that defined German social policy in the Weimar era. Nevertheless, until Larry Frohman's new study, no historian had attempted to come to terms with the complexities and contradictions in the development of the German welfare state across the longue durée and within a wider European context. It is this synthetic approach that makes Frohman's book such an important contribution to an already crowded field.

One can only begin to glean the limits of the “social discipline paradigm,” Frohman argues, by asking how and when “poor people came to be recognized as deserving of assistance.” The seminal moment in this history occurred during the Reformation, which resulted in the “desacralization of poverty and almsgiving.” Soon frustrated by the failure of municipal authorities to remedy the problem, the absolutist state responded by instituting overt forms of social disciplining embodied in the workhouse. With the Enlightenment, the repressive, paternalistic, and ultimately unsuccessful nature of “houses of correction” gave way to a liberal discourse that emphasized volunteerism and the importance of moral reform in producing industrious worker-citizens. Focused more on deterrence than prevention, the few programs that did develop in the nineteenth century, exemplified by Prussia's Elberfeld system, remained local and uncoordinated, providing minimal relief. With the onset of rapid industrialization and the emergence of “modern” science in the late-nineteenth century, policies shifted from an emphasis on individual morality to social reform and preventive social welfare. At once an outgrowth and a partial rejection of traditional poor relief, the new “progressive” paradigm reworked the liberal social contract, providing an array of state programs—from health and unemployment insurance to old age pensions and child support—in return for national service. As Frohman puts it, this late-nineteenth century shift from deterrence to prevention, from Christian charity and liberal voluntarism to social interventionism and progressivism, “represents the conceptual missing link” between localized poor laws and centralized state welfare.

The second half of the book analyzes the deployment of this new paradigm during the last three decades of the Kaiserreich. Through an explicit focus on the interplay between citizenship, social rights, and the state, the author begins by providing a welcome reinterpretation of the most prominent players in the Wilhelmine social welfare debate: (liberal) bourgeois women, Catholic charities, and Social Democrats. Although his analysis of Social Democracy remains superficial, Frohman does an effective job illustrating the rather different ideological attitudes toward the individual and the state propagated by these three crucial constituencies, the precursors to the Weimar coalition. The next chapters take up the implications of the new paradigm in three areas of social engagement: the family, the unemployed, and children, respectively. Chapter ten in particular emphasizes the Janus-faced nature of the Wilhelmine reform movement, which worked to maintain the liberal, individualist premises of the nineteenth century while simultaneously betraying a tendency toward social disciplining.

For Frohman, World War I was both a watershed and a culmination of existing trends. Simply put, as the state demanded more of its citizens, its citizens—including women, workers, the unemployed, invalids, and the elderly—expected more of the state. These escalating demands put in stark relief the inadequacies of deterrent poor relief and necessitated an even larger, more coordinated role for the state and localities in preventive social welfare. Thus Frohman sees the emergence of the modern welfare state, at least in Germany, as part and parcel of a new conception of social citizenship anchored in national solidarity and sacrifice. At the same time, the diverse strategies and competing worldviews of welfare reformers led to disagreement over the best ways to distribute resources and alleviate poverty. Once transposed to the parliamentary arena, these differences produced conflicts that deadlocked Weimar politics and helped to bring down the Republic.

Ultimately, this book seeks less to produce a social history of poor relief in German-speaking Europe than it does an analysis of the “cultural frameworks and discursive strategies” employed by “the dominant classes” in response to problems of the poor. Where the needy do appear, they remain objects of these discursive strategies. The author is certainly correct to try and decenter social welfare praxis from the teleological view that it is or always has been the purview of the national (territorial) state. Yet Prussia looms increasingly large throughout the text, while 1870 occurs repeatedly as the decisive caesura. Indeed, despite the extraterritorial, pan-European approach laid out in the first third of the book, virtually all case studies emerge from regions that would eventually join the kleindeutsch Reich. One wonders, for example, whether the Reformation would have played as great a role in this history had Vienna, Munich, or Salzburg received the same attention as Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Elberfeld. But these minor inconsistencies do little to detract from an exceedingly stimulating, invariably original examination of the political, cultural, and intellectual process that created the modern welfare state.