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Changing Boundaries of the Political Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Historical research must force open the gates of the present. The paradox is that the best means to that end seems to me an immersion in what I have called the historical longue durée.
Fernand BraudelDimensions of social protection and welfare
The overwhelming public support for government intervention in the social field and for the welfare state has been gradually but surely weakening. As one official observer has pointed out:
In the early 1960's it would have been very difficult to find any long-term forecast not based on the assumption that the growth of the welfare state was just as long lasting – and for that matter just as desirable – a process as economic growth itself. Since then, however, general attitudes have changed considerably and the ruling thought nowadays is more probably that the continued growth of the welfare state is neither likely nor even desirable.
Indeed, both neoliberal and neo-Marxist analyses of the crisis of the welfare state converge. They argue that the spectacular growth of public expenditures in Western countries in the last decades endangers the accumulation process. The burden imposed upon business to finance welfare programs together with the rise in the interest rates resulting from deficit financing induce a scarcity in the supply of capital for productive investment. Albert Hirschmann reminds us that this argument was advanced long ago by Colin Clark, who “alleged that in the nature of the capitalist system a fairly rigid limit was set to the ability to divert factor income for purposes of expanding social services and other public expenditures.”
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