State institutions, political power and social policy choices: Reconstructing the origins of Nordic models of social policy (original) (raw)
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Reinhart Koselleck has taught us that one of the main characteristics of modern political concepts is their being “temporalised”. They were shaped as a means of governing the tension between “the space experience and the horizon of expectation” that was constitutive of the modern notions of history and politics. The concepts became “instruments for the direction of historical movement” (Koselleck 1979, 344), which was often conceptualized as development or progress. From our current historical perspectives, the making of the welfare state easily appears as an important phase and stream of “historical movement” in the Nordic countries. However, it was quite late that the concept of the welfare state played any significant part in the direction of this movement (Beland & Petersen ed. 2014; Edling ed. 2019).
The concept of society in the making of the Nordic welfare state
Globalizing Welfare, 2019
The concept of society in the making of the Nordic welfare state "The Great Society" was what Lyndon B. Johnson named his programme aimed at extending the social responsibilities of government. At the same time, Tage Erlander urged the Swedish Social Democrats to build a "Strong Society". Later, Margaret Thatcher declared that "there is no such thing as society". However, this did not hinder her successor, David Cameron, from his ambition of creating "the Big Society" by shrinking the social responsibilities of government. "Concepts are more important for what they do than for what they mean", as Nikolas Rose (1999, 9) puts it. The concept of society has served a great number of needs in linguistic political arsenals. Most obviously, it has played a role in contestations regarding the welfare state. It has been a tool for shaping or shaking up "the normative foundations of the welfare state", to use the phrase Stein Kuhnle and Nanna Kildal employ in their book on the Nordic welfare state model (Kildal & Kuhnle 2005). Modern political concepts were constructed in relation to the idea of history as movement, called development or progress. They became, according to Reinhart Koselleck (1979, 344), "instruments for the direction of historical movement". In present national narratives of the Nordic countries, as well as in narratives of Nordicness, the making of the welfare state appears as a great phase of "the historical movement". It is true that social-policy reforms extending the regulative and redistributive functions of the state were associated with views of history as development and progress. However, as recent studies on social-policy language indicate (Béland & Petersen eds. 2014; Edling ed. 2019), it was only rather late in the twentieth century that the concept of the welfare state played any significant part in efforts to steer this historical movement. I will argue that in the Nordic countries, "society" was allocated specific meanings that caused it to play a special role in the process that was retrospectively conceptualised as the building of the welfare state. The concept of society has seemingly been associated with an assumption that society does