There is no lack of studies on the history of the German welfare state in the years after the Second World War. The eleven-volume Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik seit 1945 (History of German Social Policy since 1945), which was published between 2001 and 2008 under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, underscored the monumental importance that the welfare state already has assumed in the historiography as well as in the public opinion of the Federal Republic of Germany (Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik seit 1945, 12 vols. [2001–2008]). The welfare state has become an important part of the national self-image. In the experience of citizens, state action is predominantly welfare state action: “virtually everyone is affected by social policies” (203). For this reason, research tends to deal almost exclusively with the different fields of social policy: social security, welfare, housing policy, occupational health and safety, and so on. In contrast, the history of ideas, discourses, and concepts of the welfare state has received rather little attention. Jürgen Kaube even spoke of a “reflection deficit of the welfare state” (Jürgen Kaube, “Das Reflexionsdefizit des Wohlfahrtsstaates,” in Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Grundbegriffe. Historische und aktuelle Diskurse, ed. Stephan Lessenich [2003], 41–54).

Peter C. Caldwell counters this impression in his lucid and very readable study. Self-description and self-reflection in the German welfare state since 1945 are at the center of his analysis, whereby Caldwell wants to offer more than just a history of ideas: “political thought under the conditions of the postwar welfare state” (1) also interests him because it shows the gradual process of the welfare state becoming a matter of course in public opinion. No later than the major pension reform of 1957 and the Federal Social Assistance Act of 1961, a “transition from crisis management to a lasting, post-crisis system of social security” (74) took place. This was accompanied by the partial replacement of the phrase “welfare state” with two other phrases that would soon become familiar to most Germans: “social market economy” (soziale Marktwirtschaft) and “social constitutional state” (sozialer Rechtsstaat); the latter phrase was used already in the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of 1949. State intervention, market economy, social policy, and the constitutional state formed a unified whole in which no part, not even social policy, would appear as a foreign body, certainly not after the almost unstoppable process of economic growth that began in the 1950s and was accompanied by an incremental growth of the welfare state.

The growing acceptance of the welfare state was, however, also due to those specialists and intellectuals like Hans Achinger, who had come up through the middle-class social reform movements of the Weimar Republic and contributed to the self-reflection of the welfare state through their work. Achinger long remained sceptical of the welfare state and criticized state welfare policy, which seemed to him as totalizing and threatening to undermine the family's sense of responsibility for one another. He was also sceptical about democracy, which allowed organized interests to “mobilize and take control over the state” (85). Precisely for this reason, he also saw in democracy—and not without good reason—a driving force for the constant expansion of the welfare state. But Achinger was aware that there could be no going back to the time of self-reliance, and he finally became a “reluctant proponent of systematic social security” (86). Following Friedrich Meinecke's famous self-description as a “republican by reason,” who had made his peace with the Weimar Republic, one could characterize Achinger (and others) as experts who finally became what we might call state interventionists by reason.

Criticism of the welfare state—mostly from an orthodox-liberal perspective, for example by Wilhelm Röpke, but since the 1970s also from the New Left with its criticism of state structures of control—continued to exist, but it remained “politically ineffective” (195). The welfare state outlasted all its critics, not least because they never succeeded in gaining substantial influence within the major political parties of the Federal Republic. Even the so-called Wende, which occurred in 1982 with the replacement of the social-liberal coalition by Helmut Kohl's conservative cabinet, and was accompanied by antiwelfare rhetoric, did not bring about a substantial reduction of social policy: “The welfare state had great staying power,” Caldwell sums up (195).

Caldwell's study is not without weaknesses, despite the richness of its discourse analysis. Its subject—“Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany”—is examined in a vacuum, so to speak. Quite a few of the actors examined already had become welfare specialists in the last years of the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism, but their formative experiences during these years are not really built into the analysis of their postwar positions. It is also astonishing that the development of social welfare in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is almost completely ignored. Certainly, the book focuses on West Germany, but the debates in the West cannot be entirely understood without connection to East Germany, especially given the GDR by no means followed the Soviet pattern of social policy, but in many respects remained within the trajectory of the Bismarckian model.

It is questionable whether Caldwell's basic thesis—that “it was through discussing the welfare state that German thinkers debated what capitalism and modern democracy are” (203)—has validity in the immediate postwar years. Was the main thrust of the debate in these years about capitalism and democracy, or rather about the efficient combating of poverty and the resulting legitimation of the state? A comparative look at the GDR, its function in the West German debates and vice versa, could have helped to understand more precisely this transformation from legitimation of the state to legitimation of democracy, which gradually took place with and through the welfare state in West Germany. Nonetheless, Caldwell does pioneering work with his history of ideas on the welfare state and successfully consigns assumptions about the welfare state's reflection deficit into the realm of legend. All future work on the topic will have to take this study into acoount.