If the Holocaust is the negative pole of post-war German national identity, then its counterpart is the welfare state, and the book under review here can be seen as an element of the memory work involved in reassuring the Germans of the value of this achievement. This slim volume is an English translation of a section of a 1,000-page tome that was published in 2001 to serve as an introduction to a comprehensive research project – sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Labour and Social Order and involving both primary source collections and interpretive works – on German social policy since 1945.

The author is professor of public law, and, both for better and for worse, the story told here is one of political institutions, laws and administration in the broad domain of what Stolleis calls social protection. Culture, society and economy are all largely absent from the book, which identifies social protection primarily with social insurance and labour law. As a result, the book only touches upon the social welfare programmes that formed the second pillar of the German welfare state and all of the debates social discipline and bio-politics that are the central theoretical concern of most works dealing with these programmes.

The book begins with an introduction by Lutz Leisering, who provides a brief tour d'horizon of the monograph-length contributions to the original publication, and includes five substantive chapters by Stolleis. Following a brief introduction to his own narrative, Stolleis’ second chapter surveys the various forms and institutions of social protection from the Middle Ages to German unification in 1870/71. The third (and longest) chapter focuses on the development of social insurance in Imperial Germany. The fourth and fifth chapters carry the story through World War I and the Weimar Republic, respectively, with the final substantive chapter concentrating on the Nazi era. Stolleis’ account of the Bismarckian social insurance legislation is the strongest chapter in the book. Stolleis nicely captures the plurality of ideas, motives and influences that shaped the social insurance laws of the 1880s, and he ultimately portrays (pp. 57–63) these measures as lineal descendants of both Christian notions of office and service and the political morality of the nascent territorial states, whose authority was legitimated in terms of the promotion of ‘good order’ and happiness (Polizei). Stolleis argues that the apparent paradox of precocious social intervention in a belated nation can be resolved by recognising that ‘this step into modernity could succeed only because elements of pre-liberal statehood were better preserved in Germany than elsewhere (p. 59). Consequently, social liberalism gets only short shrift in this account. In contrast to ‘the fundamental willingness of conservative thinking to overlay the freedom of contract with bonds of ethics and public law (p. 62), Stolleis argues that liberalism – weakly rooted, politically divided, and allergic as it was to state intervention, especially that of Bismarckian provenance – could provide no positive rationale for such state-sponsored insurance.

The theme of chapters 4 through 6 is one of evolutionary continuity, that is the steady differentiation of the major social insurance programs (and the addition of new ones) as more and more social groups were brought within the ambit of social insurance and as these programmes expanded to offer social protection against an ever-growing number of risks characteristic of increasingly complex industrial mass societies. The proliferation of legislative and administrative measures makes these chapters less than easy to read, though this difficulty is inherent in the subject matter. Chapter 6 on the Nazi state is the weakest in the book. Although Stolleis is well aware of the centrality of race to Nazi social policy, he does not address its role in labor law, factory governance, social welfare or population policy; nor does he describe how Nazi social policies fit into their broader programme for the racial restructuring of European society. Instead, his primary interest lies in the continuing differentiation of the social insurance system, the institutional continuities of social insurance programmes established before 1914 and the similarities between the plan of Robert Ley, the leader of the German Labour Front, to create a unitary social insurance programme and the Beveridge Plan (pp. 142–3, 150).

In his conclusion, Stolleis returns to a theme that he had broached in the introduction: the historicity of the current social insurance system, its success as an engine of redistribution and social integration and its economic, demographic and social fragility. An historical account, such as the one he offers in this volume, is necessary, Stolleis argues, because the German welfare ‘system’ is comprised of diverse forms of social protection that date from different times and that are grounded in different principles. ‘The longer the interweaving persists and increases’, he argues, ‘the more difficult it becomes to legitimize separate institutions with their own tradition, financing, and clientele’ (p. 153), though at the same time he notes that an intrinsic characteristic of the comprehensive social state is to iron out and synchronise such historical differences. Secondly, Stolleis examines the ambiguities arising out of the secular trend towards the externalisation of social protection, that is the growing professionalism and the greater dignity and freedom for the individual resulting from the displacement of responsibility for social risks from the family onto a growing thicket of institutions – as well as the simultaneous ‘loss of feeling of being at the mercy of anonymous bureaucracies, the sense of alienation in “external” institutions, and the monetarization of human relations’ (p. 156). Thirdly, Stolleis reflects on the political complexities resulting from the development of de facto systems of national insurance, in which the vast majority of citizens are at one and the same time payers of social insurance contributions, recipients of social benefits and services and citizens in whose hands the legitimacy of the modern welfare state ultimately lies. These concluding reflections grow more out of Stolleis’ knowledge of the topic than out of his historical narrative; they nevertheless make for a thought-provoking conclusion.