What is the Welfare State? A Sociological Restatement

Speakers: Professor David Garland, Professor Nicola Lacey
Chair: Professor Craig Calhoun

Recorded on 10 November 2014 in Old Theatre, Old Building.

What, in fact, is the Welfare State? Commentators talk as if it were an historic moment in post-war Britain or New Deal America. Academics discuss “the death of the social” and a shift “from social state to penal state” as if it had been displaced by neo-liberalism. This lecture traces the emergence of the welfare state as a specific mode of government, describing its distinctive rationality as well as its forms, functions and effects. It explains why the welfare state is now a “normal social fact” – an essential (though constantly contested) part of the social and economic organisation of advanced industrial societies.

David Garland is Professor of Sociology at NYU and Shimizu Visiting Professor at LSE Law.

Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at LSE.

Professor Craig Calhoun is the Director of LSE.

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