What has brought about the widespread public provision of welfare and income security within free-market liberalism? Some social scientists have regarded welfare as a preindustrial atavism; others, as a functional requirement of industrial society. Most recently, scholars have stressed the reformist actions of center-left parties during the decades following World War II, the workings of "new" post-industrial politics lately, and a multifaceted role of politics and state institutions overall. Alexander Hicks thoroughly revises these views, stressing the enduring significance of class organizations, however politically embedded, from the era of Bismark until the present.

Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism describes and explains income security programs in affluent and democratic capitalist nations, from the proto-democratic innovators of the 1880s to the globally buffeted democracies of the 1990s. Hicks's account stresses the reformist role of employee political and economic organization and derivative institutions, in particular, social democratic parties, labor unions, and neo-corporatist arrangements. These forces, arrayed as the elements of a transnational and century-long social democratic movement, give direction and continuity to the emergence, development, and contestation of income security policies.

What has brought about the widespread public provision of welfare and income security within free-market liberalism? Some social scientists have regarded welfare as a preindustrial atavism; others, as a functional requirement of industrial society. Most recently, scholars have stressed the reformist actions of center-left parties during the decades following World War II, the workings of "new" post-industrial politics lately, and a multifaceted role of politics and state institutions overall. Alexander Hicks thoroughly revises these views, stressing the enduring significance of class organizations, however politically embedded, from the era of Bismark until the present. Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism describes and explains income security programs in affluent and democratic capitalist nations, from the proto-democratic innovators of the 1880s to the globally buffeted democracies of the 1990s. Hicks's account stresses the reformist role of employee political and economic organization and derivative institutions, in particular, social democratic parties, labor unions, and neo-corporatist arrangements. These forces, arrayed as the elements of a transnational and century-long social democratic movement, give direction and continuity to the emergence, development, and contestation of income security policies.

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Hicks's vast and impressive study... makes valuable contributions to the study of the welfare state.

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Alexander Hicks has written one of the most important works in the past thirty years on the development of income security policies in democratic capitalist states. If this were not sufficient, the book also is the most significant comparative public policy study I have read. Based on years of reflection, scholarship and teaching, it covers, not merely cites, a range of literatures. It is extremely sensitive to particular historical experiences. It is theoretically informed. Most impressively, it is methodologically sophisticated and imaginative. And the book is concise and well-written. In short, it is a model of what exciting comparative research can be.

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This book by Alexander Hicks is a number-cruncher's delight, but is should be of interest to normal people as well because of its exceptional awareness of the entire range of literature on welfore programs.

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Through sophisticated and historically sensitive quantitative and formal qualitative analyses, he is able to appraise the social democratic thesis through several phases of welfare state development.... The results are so rich as to be difficult to sumarize in a short review.