Description
Book SynopsisWhat has brought about the widespread public provision of welfare and income security within free-market liberalism? Some social scientists have regarded welfare as a preindustrial atavism; others, as a functional requirement of industrial society...
Trade ReviewHicks's vast and impressive study... makes valuable contributions to the study of the welfare state.
-- Timothy Tilton, Indiana University * American Journal of Sociology *
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. 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 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.
-- Norman Furniss, Indiana University * Comparative Politics *
This book by Alexander Hicks is a number-cruncher's delight, but is should be of interest to normal people as well because of its exceptional awareness of the entire range of literature on welfore programs.
-- Donald Sassoon, University of London * American Historical Review *
Through sophisticated and historically sensitive quantitative and formal qualitative analyses, he is able to appraise the social democratic thesis through several phases of welfare state development.... The results are so rich as to be difficult to sumarize in a short review.
-- Edwin Amenta, New York University * Contemporary Sociology *
