This book is a collection of Professor Kaufmann's writings over a long and distinguished career. Much of his published work has been in German and this will be the first opportunity many will have had to read across his varied contributions to the social policy literature providing an especially German perspective on the origins of social policy thinking.

I well remember my first encounter with Ralph Dahrendorf when he became Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) in the early 1970s. ‘Ah,’ he said ‘you will, of course, be familiar with the German origins of your subject in the middle of the nineteenth century.’ As he very well knew, I was not. It was a typically provoking remark.

So this book will help students, and perhaps their teachers, escape from an excessively British focus on the history of social policy ideas. The chapters on the ‘Pioneers of Social Reformism’ (Sismondi, List and Mill), the ‘German Origins of Social Reform’ and their ‘Christian Influences’ are particularly helpful. So, too, is the account of the development of the work of the International Labour Organisation and the emergence of human rights ideas and their post-war international formulation.

Kaufmann takes the notion of ‘a political responsibility for the basic well-being of all members of a political society’ (p. 1) as his definition of a ‘welfare state’. This social goal is best achieved, he argues, through a range of interventions – legal duties laid on a range of actors, economic interventions of various kinds, spatial planning and regulation and financial and other support for individuals as well as state provided services. Families, associations, firms, regulated labour markets and state organisations are all complimentary agencies through which this basic goal can be realised. The lowest level agency that can do the job should do the job. This reflects the mixed modes by which German social policy has been delivered and the body of ideas that underpin it.

He develops German authors’ ideas about human ‘assets’ comparing them to American notions of ‘human capital’ – too narrow and monetary – and Sen's ‘capabilities’. This is a useful example of differing approaches to similar ideas derived from varied intellectual traditions. The last part of the book is made up of a selection of his thoughts on ‘The Future of the Welfare State’.

At the heart of the author's historical account is the view that social policy begins with industrialisation, taming its impact on individuals’ and families’ well-being. Social insurance and the role of trade unions in wage bargaining play a central role in the traditional German view of social policy. As one consequence, the administration of public assistance, and its modern counterparts, plays little part, except dismissively. Now it is true that ‘the Poor Laws’ are an English obsession, but they, or their equivalent, live on inextricably entangled with modern income support rules and service delivery, and not just in the UK. You cannot understand social policy without understanding that inheritance in my view. Social insurance contributions and payments fill a privileged political and intellectual position in Europe, or parts of it, just as the NHS does in the UK. But, as the long recession has bit in Europe, those with entrenched social insurance rights have been shielded, at least in part and in some countries, while those without them have suffered. This has brought a sharper distinction between social insurance insiders and the less fortunate outsiders – marginal workers and the young (Emmenegger et al., Reference Emmenegger, Häusermann, Palier and Seeleib-Kaiser2012). So social insurance can itself be a new form of social division. Central wage bargaining and the protections it brings have been eroded in Germany, and elsewhere, in an attempt to ‘modernise’ labour markets. What are the long-term implications of this change? How are we to view Germany's contribution to Europe's post-crisis economy and its neighbours’ welfare systems? These chapters were written before such questions became critical. Education has only very recently been included in the German social policy tradition. The same is true of child care and pre-school facilities. These lagged well behind those in France and the Scandinavian countries until relatively recently, though Germany has been catching up, if unevenly, across Länder (Oberhuemer, Reference Oberhuemer, Gambaro, Stewart and Waldfogel2014). But these differences in focus and attention are interesting in themselves and the book set me thinking about them.

‘Foundations’ look different depending on the institutional history of the country from which you view them – my colleague Jane Lewis’ point. This book is a good example. Yet, surely, whatever our original historical starting points, all welfare states are hybrids now – discuss.

Let me end, though, with Kaufmann's first sentence – ‘If we want to know where to go, we have to know where we came from.’ With that I could not agree more.