This is a landmark book for international scholarship in social policy. It has been compiled by some of the leading international scholars in the field and published, in some style, by Oxford University Press. At £85 for a hardback copy, some may baulk at the commitment to purchasing such a collection. But with forty-eight substantive chapters over almost 900 pages, purchasers will in practice get value for money, and will not in my view regret the investment. In any case, all academics in the field should ensure that university libraries acquire copies of the book. It will prove to be an essential reference for all those studying social policy, as well as many in politics, public administration, sociology and other cognate subjects.

The aim of the collection is to bring together international scholars working on social policy and the welfare state to contribute a state of the art comparative analysis of most of the key issues in the field. The contributions are grouped into eight sections (parts) covering – philosophical justifications and critiques, history, approaches, inputs and actors, policies, policy outcomes, worlds of welfare, and prospects. They include chapters ranging across the emergence of western welfare states, gender, religion, the European Union, pensions, disability, retrenchment, different welfare regimes, and much, much more. The final prospects section is comprised of two chapters on sustainability (Glennerster) and global futures (Gough and Therborn). This collection is asking some big questions about welfare states, and provides some well-informed and densely argued answers.

The editors have gathered together an impressive list of contributors too, from across the developed world, although in practice the vast majority come from the UK and continental Europe, and the United States. Most contributors will be well known to social policy readers, but in addition to those working directly in the subject, there are leading scholars from politics and sociology too – all experts in their fields.

This is a book about welfare states, one of the defining features of twentieth-century social and economic development in the Western world, or more accurately now perhaps the global North. The contributions combine to explain why welfare states developed, how they emerged and changed, how we study and measure them, what key issues they address, what major services they provide and what challenges they will face in the new century. In addressing these topics, the contributors all take an international stance, explaining principles and drawing on evidence from across a wide range of countries within the developed world. Many, for instance, use OECD data or, where they exist, independent comparative research studies. There is much comparative empirical analysis for readers to wrestle with here. However, even where no direct comparative data are relied on, contributors develop their analysis impressively across national boundaries, focusing upon issues of structure and principal, so that discussion is made relevant to readers across the world. This is a genuinely international analysis of the welfare state, and will be of interest to readers working in English in all countries.

In addition to the substantive chapters, and the analysis and data included in them, this book provides other resources that will be of interest to social policy scholars. There is an extensive list of references, running to a hundred pages, and also detailed subject and names indexes over fifty pages in length. These are excellent resources. More generally, the editors and the publisher have put a lot of effort into making this an attractive volume. In addition to all the academic material, there is a an attractive jacket illustration based on postage stamps from across the world featuring welfare state issues or people, and these are listed in a note in the preliminary pages, by Leibfried, which also explains how they were chosen and why. This is commendable attention to detail.

More generally, it is attention to detail, co-existing with breadth of vision and reach, which make this such an attractive book. The editors and their contributors are addressing most of the big questions that underpin the history of the welfare state and its future prospects, and they are doing this on an international scale. Yet at the same time, the analysis in the substantive chapters is generally meticulous, and is backed up with extensive empirical evidence. The book will therefore be a resource and a point of reference for students of social policy across the subject and beyond. Given the range of coverage, readers may not read everything in the handbook; but I would encourage all to range beyond the particular chapters dealing with their own interests. For wherever readers look, they will find quality scholarship and engaging debate. If you are not passionate about social policy before encountering this handbook, then surely you will be once you have begun to delve into it.