Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State

by Young-Sun Hong

Book Overview

This is the first comprehensive study of the turbulent relationship among state, society, and church in the making of the modern German welfare system during the Weimar Republic. Young-Sun Hong... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691057931
• ISBN13: 9780691057934
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Welfare, Modernity and the Weimar State

This is a great book--and a really important one. You simply can't talk about the modern welfare state, and certainly not the German one, without taking into account what this book has to say. The German welfare state wasn't just about social insurance. Social welfare was also important, and this book, especially the first half, gives a detailed, but illuminating account of the ideas and politics that determined what this system would look like. The Weimar state sought to be a social democracy. But the welfare programs that were supposed to "discipline" the poor and compensate for social and economic inequalities often produced a backlash against the system, and this backlash, in turn, provided ammunition to those who opposed the welfare system in the first place. The second half of Hong's book provides a marvelous account of the resulting crisis of the welfare system; she makes a strong argument about how this crisis reflected the general crisis of the republic itself; and the last chapter shows how the Nazis used eugenic ideas to criticize some of the main features of the Weimar welfare system and how widely their ideas had come to be shared by the early 1930s. I learned so much about Weimar Germany from reading this book.

welfare, modernity, and the weimar state

The book is not easy to read, but it's well worth the effort. It tells in a very sophisticated way the story of the German welfare system during the Weimar Republic. It is just as much a book about German politics and the failure of the Republic as it is a book about welfare and the welfare state. One of the reasons why the book is so interesting is that it shows how the crisis of the welfare system reflected the broader crisis of the Republic in miniature. The last chapter describes the impact of the eugenics movement on welfare. In this chapter, the author takes issue with those people who argue that Nazism was an extension of Progressivism, and instead she gives a convincing explanation of how Nazi welfare policy was really a systematic critique of the therapeutic ideals of the welfare state, and not an extension of them. The book is also useful because it brings together a lot of the recent theories about the welfare state in Germany and elsewhere.