reason. Indeed, to use Greek political terminology, it might be argued
that the natural form of government for a capitalist economy (allow-
ing, as it does, the accumulation of large quantities of wealth in
relatively few hands) is oligarchy (government by the – rich – few)
rather than democracy (government by the – poor – many).
A wide variety of definitions of the ‘welfare state’ have been put
forward but it is convenient to adopt Johnson’s (1987) approach (see
Box 6.3).
BOX 6.3 THE WELFARE STATE
One can see the welfare state as the natural consequence of the
extension of democratic ideas to the social and welfare sphere. Thus
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed the Allied war aims to
include four freedoms (including not only freedom of worship and of
speech but also the social aims of freedom from fear and freedom
from want). In wartime Britain a consensus between parties was
evolved on the basis of the Beveridge (1942) report on the need to
conquer the ‘Five Giants’ of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and
Idleness. We have already referred to the social dimension of the UN
Declaration of Human Rights.
Despite the apparent coincidence of values between welfarism and
democracy, British readers in particular may be surprised to discover
that the welfare state cannot be said to have originated with the
Labour victory in Britain in 1945. Many of the moves toward a
welfare state in Britain took place in the early twentieth century partly
as a reaction to the prior development of welfarism in Bismarck’s
Germany (an autocratic rather than a liberal democratic state).
STATES 141A modern liberal democratic industrial state in which the state has
intervened to:
1 provide a wide range of social services to the bulk of the population;
2 seek to maintain full employment;
3 nationalise or regulate a number of key industries, but in which the
bulk of the economy remains in the hands of private enterprise.
(After Johnson, 1987)