Harris on Hennock, _The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850-1914: Social Policies Compared_

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Published by EH.NET (August 2008)

E.P. Hennock, _The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 
1850-1914: Social Policies Compared_.  Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2007.  xvii + 381 pp. $36 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-59770-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Bernard Harris, Division of Sociology and Social 
Policy, University of Southampton.


Peter Hennock is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University 
of Liverpool.  Over the course of a long and distinguished career he has 
published numerous articles together with seminal accounts of the 
history of English local government in the nineteenth century [1] and 
the influence of German social reform on the introduction of social 
insurance in Great Britain before 1914.[2]  It is difficult to think of 
any single author who is better qualified to undertake the task he has 
set himself in the current volume.

Although this study is entitled _The Origin of the Welfare State in 
England and Germany_, this title is in some respects misleading.  The 
book has comparatively little to say about the relationship between 
gender and the welfare state or about the role of charity and 
philanthropy in the evolution of welfare provision.  It also has very 
little to say about a range of issues which are commonly associated with 
the welfare state, at least in Britain, such as the development of 
hospital services, the expansion of public education, the introduction 
of public housing or the provision of social care, and it is very 
largely confined to the period before 1914.  However, what the book does 
provide is a meticulous and richly-detailed account of the development 
of such services as sickness insurance, invalidity benefits and old-age 
pensions in Germany, and pensions, health insurance and unemployment 
insurance in the United Kingdom and, as the author suggests, these 
issues are certainly central to the development of the modern welfare 
state, even if they are not exactly coterminous with it.

The book also reflects a particular approach to the conduct of 
comparative history.  As Hennock explains in the introductory chapter, 
one of his main aims is to compare the historiographies of welfare 
provision in the two countries in order to see how far the different 
points of emphasis in one country raise new questions about the 
development of welfare policy in the other country.  Having done this, 
the book’s second key aim is to investigate the different paths taken by 
the two countries between 1850 and 1914 and to explain, in the light of 
this, why social insurance has ended up playing a much smaller role in 
the long-term development of welfare policy in Britain than it has in 
Germany.  If I have understood Hennock’s arguments correctly, this 
question can be answered in two main ways: first, by reference to the 
importance of the voluntary tradition in British social welfare; and, 
second, by reference to the association of the origins of the British 
system of national insurance with the poor law.

The main part of the book consists of four sections containing seventeen 
numbered chapters and a “Conclusion and Epilogue.”  In Part I, Hennock 
begins by comparing the development of poor relief in the two countries. 
  He argues that it is impossible to understand the development of 
social insurance in Germany without first considering the system of poor 
relief, and that the neglect of this topic has constituted a major gap 
in German welfare historiography.  He then proceeds to compare the 
extent of poor law provision in the two countries and concludes that, 
despite the aims of both the poor law reformers of 1834 and the 
“crusaders” against outdoor relief in the 1870s, Britain still spent 
more money on poor relief, and provided more generous assistance to a 
wider spectrum of the population, than its German counterpart.  He also 
compares the machinery of poor law administration in the two countries 
and argues that, despite prevailing national stereotypes, it was the 
British, and not the German system, which gave less discretion to local 
authorities and relied more heavily on professional administrators.

After establishing the importance of the poor law as a key starting 
point for the understanding of later developments, Hennock moves on to 
explore the history of factory legislation and the relationship between 
the state and industrial injury.  In England and Wales, there was a much 
stronger tradition of government legislation to impose minimum standards 
on working conditions in factories and workplaces and this helped to 
protect individuals against the risk of accidents at work.  In Germany, 
there was more resistance to this kind of factory legislation and this 
led to the emergence of a much stronger accident insurance scheme as a 
way of coercing employers into creating safer working environments. 
Hennock also makes it clear that the prime mover in the development of 
this scheme was a senior official in the Prussian Ministry of Trade and 
Industry, Theodor Lohmann, and that both the Sickness Insurance Law of 
1883 and the Accident Insurance Law of 1884, as well as the Invalidity 
and Old Age Pension Insurance Law of 1889, owed much more to the work of 
men like Lohmann and Robert Bosse, the Head of the Ministry’s Economic 
Division, than to any of Bismarck’s initiatives.

The third, and by far the longest, section of the book is concerned with 
the evolution of a range of measures designed to offer protection 
against the hazards of sickness, invalidity and old age.  Hennock begins 
by comparing the development of friendly societies in the United Kingdom 
with that of Hilfskassen (and subsequently Krankenkassen) in Prussia and 
Germany, before going on to describe the origins of the Sickness 
Insurance Law of 1883.  He then proceeds to examine the next stage in 
the evolution of the German system of social insurance, namely the 
Invalidity and Old Age Insurance Law of 1889.  He identifies a number of 
key differences between the German schemes and those introduced by the 
British government between 1908 and 1911.  In Germany, the primary 
purpose of the Invalidity and Old Age insurance scheme was to provide 
compensation for loss of earnings as a result of invalidity and the 
provision of a separate old-age pension scheme was, in the words of one 
historian, “no more than a decorative addition” (quoted on p. 191).  By 
contrast, in Britain it was the relief of old age itself which took 
priority and national health insurance was only introduced three years 
later.  There were also key differences in the ways in which the 
different schemes were financed, and these had a dramatic bearing on the 
value of the benefits which could be provided.  In Britain, the old-age 
pension scheme was funded out of general taxation and the receipt of 
benefits was subject to a means test.  The national health insurance 
scheme had more in common with its German predecessor but it was funded 
by flat-rate contributions rather than graduated contributions, and this 
meant that the opportunities for growth were much more limited.

Although Germany preceded Britain in the introduction of sickness 
insurance and old-age pensions, there was no comparable effort to 
introduce a national system of unemployment insurance before 1914.  In 
Britain, the foundations of a national scheme were laid by the 
introduction of short-term unemployment insurance benefits for a limited 
number of workers in 1911 and both the extent and the coverage of the 
scheme were expanded greatly after the end of the First World War. 
However, although this might appear more generous, the long-term 
viability of the unemployment insurance scheme continued to be hampered 
by its dependence on flat-rate contributions, which were inevitably 
limited by the capacity of the lowest-paid workers to pay, and this 
continued to be the case when both unemployment insurance and health 
insurance were replaced by a consolidated scheme of national insurance 
in 1946.  Hennock argues that this decision played a crucial role in 
limiting the scope of national insurance in postwar Britain, and that 
even though different governments attempted to address the problem by 
introducing graduated pensions in 1959 and an earnings-related 
supplement to short-term national insurance benefits in 1966, the die 
had long since been cast.

Notes:

1. E.P. Hennock, _Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in 
Nineteenth-century Urban Government_, London: Edward Arnold, 1973.

2. E.P. Hennock, _British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case 
of Social Insurance, 1880-1914_, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.


Bernard Harris is Professor of the History of Social Policy in the 
Division of Sociology and Social Policy, School of Social Sciences, 
University of Southampton, UK.  He has published extensively in the 
areas of anthropometric history, the history of health and living 
standards, and the history of social policy.  He is the author of _The 
Origins of the British Welfare State: Social Welfare in England and 
Wales, 1800-1945_ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and coeditor 
of _Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800_ (New 
York: Routledge, 2007).  Email address: bjh2 at soton.ac.uk.

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