In writing about the history of social policy, ‘Poor Law’ principles have often been unfavourably compared to ‘welfare state’ principles, as strategies and social philosophies for distributing services and resources to persons in need. Poor Law provision has often been associated with policies of concentrating welfare provision on the ‘very poor’, with the exercise of discretion, means testing and character discrimination in determining who should receive public assistance within any given community, and with the denial of civic privileges and social respect. Welfare state provision, by contrast, has been seen as universal in coverage, deliberately detached from assessments of moral character, and potentially available to all members of a community – regardless of wealth, class, economic or social position – as a matter of civic status and citizen right. Although most sharply emphasised in the historiography of social policy in Britain, a similar narrative of historical evolution from archaic Poor Laws to progressive welfare states pervades many accounts of social welfare provision in other parts of Europe, the British Commonwealth, Japan and the US (Trattner, 1974; Mommsen, 1981; Baldwin, 1990; Gould, 1993).

Whether the principles underlying these two models have been accurately identified, however, and whether the historical progression from the one to the other has typically been one-way, seems increasingly open to question. The publication of a volume of essays in honour of Howard Glennerster, whose work has very often addressed both the positive and negative relationships between earlier forms of welfare provision and the imperatives of current policy, seems an apposite moment for reviewing this dichotomy. In this essay, it will be argued that familiar portrayals of the key characteristics of the two systems are in certain respects caricatures; that in real historical settings the two have often coexisted (and continue to coexist) in tandem; and that each of them may be seen as complementary to certain wider economic strategies. In particular, I shall suggest that some at least of the principles often seen as fundamental to ‘progressive’ social policy had their primal origins in the archaic roots of the Poor Laws, although often attributed to the rise of ‘modern’ welfare states.

The celebration of Howard Glennerster's 70th birthday in October 2006 coincided with the anniversary of a seminal moment in the history of welfare provision in Britain, and indeed of ‘welfare state’ thinking more generally, that had occurred almost exactly a hundred years before.