This volume explores three distinct categories of social welfare across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: abandoned or neglected children, vagrants or homeless people, and unemployed workers. The three categories provide the structure for the volume, which includes case studies from various countries and empires. The editors proceed from the assumption that the social ties created by family, home, and workplace were essential for the perception and relief of poverty across modern Europe. Twenty-first-century social conflicts that escalated into urban riots in France and England were quickly blamed on the disintegration of social relations at the level of families and communities. Yet, the breakdown of social ties was not, as the editors contend, a recent phenomenon, but extended back to the onset of the industrial age.

More important, the editors argue that capitalist societies face a fundamental conundrum in that they encourage individualism at the expense of communalism and thereby undermine the glue that holds society together. The editors realize that this volume cannot provide a full understanding of this conundrum, which characterized modern European economic and social development over the last two centuries. They nevertheless hope to provide critical insight into this complex and multifaceted phenomenon by presenting explorations of how societies dealt with abandoned children, the homeless, and the unemployed. Whereas three sections of this volume investigate these phenomena from the viewpoint of authorities and welfare agents, the fourth section focuses on the viewpoint of those poor who were the target of social welfare policies.

In the first section on abandoned children, the contribution by Katharina Brandes on children cared for by the public institutions of Hamburg from 1892 to 1914 stands out for a thorough statistical investigation that reveals that, by far, not all these children were true orphans. Instead, those who were considered to be a threat to social norms and middle-class standards populated the city's orphanages. These children were removed from single-parent homes because middle-class social reformers considered such homes and families insufficiently capable of providing appropriate care for children. In the second section on homeless people, Beate Althammer's chapter on the attempts of the German, English, and French governments to control vagrancy between 1880 and 1914 provides a fascinating comparative perspective. Even though these three countries were characterized by differing political cultures, the practical outcomes of their legal strategies differed very little. Since vagrancy was a complex phenomenon resulting from various motivations, it proved nearly impossible to find an all-encompassing and generally acceptable legal response. Vagrancy had nevertheless become a nuisance in all three countries and was increasingly perceived to be an economic burden, a danger to public order, and “an intolerable disgrace to civilized nations” (205).

In the third section on unemployed people, Irina Vana's investigation into the normalization of unemployment in Austria from 1918 to 1938 provides an insightful discussion of how public perception of unemployment changed over time. As Vana reminds the reader, unemployment is a modern phenomenon that came into existence with the industrial age; though it was a marginal phenomenon in times of industrial expansion—before World War I—it became a structural problem in industrial societies in the aftermath of the war. The creation of public labor exchanges, which were charged with administrating unemployment benefits, marked the transition from the provision of alms to the dispersal of unemployment benefits. This transformation created the categories of work as regular and paid activity, and of unemployment as a temporary period of non-work. But work was further subdivided into “good work,” which came with insurance and, if needed, unemployment benefits, and “bad work,” which did not provide such protections. Access to labor exchanges and unemployment benefits created various groups of unemployed social groups with varying degrees of integration into the new social welfare system.

The chapter by Dorothee Lürbke in the fourth section deserves special attention. The author provides a historical discourse analysis of letters written by destitute citizens to the city and state authorities of Freiburg in West Germany and Schwerin in East Germany from 1950 to 1975. Lürbke found remarkable similarities in the letters she examined. For one, the petitioners were mostly women acting as individuals. They argued that their destitute situation was not a result of their own doing, but rather of external factors, including the loss of support networks. In fact, petitioners in both cities rarely belonged to nuclear families. At the same time, there were significant differences as well—for example, with regard to the age of the petitioners, who were, on average, older in Freiburg than in Schwerin. In addition, those from Freiburg frequently invoked the experience of World War II as a reason for their destitute situation—a claim suspiciously absent in the letters from Schwerin.

Serge Paugam's programmatic chapter on poverty and social bonds, which provides the glue that holds this volume together, invokes Emile Durkheim's reasoning about the transition from one type of solidarity in traditional societies to another type in industrializing societies. Durkheim optimistically argued that the processes that dissolved traditional solidarity would also introduce a new “organic” solidarity resulting from the division of labor; individualism would thus go hand in hand with an increasing integration of the individual into the “social whole.” Based on Durkheim's thinking, Paugam identifies four types of social ties common to modern societies: familial bonds, elective bonds (such as friendship networks), bonds created by learning and working, and citizenship. This model allows for a sociological analysis of modern welfare systems and for explorations of the glue that holds modern societies together. Yet, as Lutz Raphael acknowledges in the concluding remarks to this volume, Paugam's model is not a historical model that can explain change over time. It nevertheless allows for an effective analysis of the mix of institutional arrangements in various welfare regimes and, for that reason, provides opportunities for comparative study.