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. (Hicks equates income security policies with “welfare states”—a point I will revisit later.) 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 wide 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.