Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective.

Over the past ten years, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have come to rely on the insights of Theda Skocpol to help explain the contours of American social policy. Through innovative interdisciplinary and comparative research, her books and essays have called into question conventional scholarly and popular notions about the development of social welfare programs in the U.S. Most notably, Skocpol has led the charge to prove that the U.S. is not the welfare laggard it is often made out to seem in comparison to Western Europe. Her work has shown that the state was not necessarily weak and ineffective prior to the "big bang" of the New Deal, but that particular historical conditions generated an uneven constellation of policies for specific populations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her 1992 book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, laid out a fascinating portrait of post-Civil War America as a "precocious social spending regime" and pointed out the maternalist politics that shaped policies in the Progressive era.

This latest collection of previously published essays, some of them co-authored, rehashes the arguments from Protecting Soldiers and Mothers in chapters two and three, includes studies of welfare policies from the New Deal through the present, and offers suggestions for new directions in social policy. Together, the essays offer a timely and complex picture of welfare state development in the United States that is enriched by occasional comparisons to Great Britain (one essay written with Gretchen Ritter specifically compares "Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United States"), and attention to contemporary concerns over poverty, health care, and welfare reform. Skocpol's other two co-authors are political scientist, G. John Ikenberry, and sociologist, Edwin Amenta.

Skocpol's introductory essay establishes the two main themes which lend coherence to pieces that range in subject matter from post-Civil War America to post-World War II Great Britain, and dates of publication from 1987 through 1994. First, she argues for the importance of an historical context within which to consider current and future social policy strategies and initiatives. Second, she introduces her "polity-centered" approach to understanding welfare state development.

The former argument that decries current welfare debates which suffer from "an almost total lack of historical and political sensibility," has been made often in recent years by scholars of social policy, welfare, and poverty. Like Linda Gordon, Michael Katz, and others, Skocpol contends that an historical perspective will reveal new insights into present dilemmas and future possibilities. Skocpol can count this book among many fine scholarly works that have amassed evidence which would seem to repudiate the logic of the current political and popular attacks on welfare. However, these claims for contemporary relevance seem to be falling upon the deliberately deaf ears of policy makers. For example, in her conclusion, Skocpol imagines an expanded system of family security that would "do more for people 'in the middle,' working parents in single- and two-parent households." (p. 311) Her decision to conclude her book "by becoming a frank advocate for a certain value position" is commendable and part of a larger trend among scholars frustrated by the lack of context that characterizes much political discourse today. However, her call for welfare to expand is too detached from current political realities to provide a viable vision of the future possibilities her title promises.

The second theme that runs through this collection advances what has become Skocpol's signature approach to studying the development of welfare states - the polity-centered approach. The essays provide ample opportunities to see this methodology at work. In her first chapter, "State Formation and Social Policy in the United States," she argues that conventional or popular approaches to examining welfare state development - the logic of industrialism approach, the national values approach, the welfare capitalism approach, and the political class struggle approach - all fall short of explaining the evolution of the American welfare state. She labels these other approaches deterministic and criticizes their inability to provide a theoretical framework that could withstand such historical peculiarities as generous veteran's benefits after the Civil War, maternalist (as opposed to paternalist) welfare policies in the early twentieth century, and the unevenness of both New Deal and Great Society programs. According to Skocpol, "A nation's historically shaped governmental institutions and political parties have much to do with the kinds of public social-welfare benefits that are instituted, when, and by, and for whom." (p. 40)

This approach is most fruitfully utilized in one of the more current pieces in the collection, entitled, "America's First Social Security System: The Expansion of Benefits for Civil War Veterans." A 1993 article from the Political Science Quarterly, this essay uses Civil War veterans' benefits as a case study to reveal the flaws in other explanations of American welfare state development and to highlight the strength of a polity-centered approach. Specifically, Skocpol illustrates how "electoral competition, political party patronage, and crossclass political coalitions influenced the growth of generous federal social provisions for many of America's elderly in the decades between the 1880s and the 1920s." (p. 41) Veterans' benefits defy conventional notions of the U.S. as a latecomer to welfare, and show that social policy is generated by the historically specific shape and interactions among government institutions, political parties, and powerful social groups or organizations.

The book also includes three essays that examine various aspects of the New Deal and the impact of World War II on welfare state development. Written prior to Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, these essays lack the gender analysis associated with Skocpol's more recent work. In "The Road to Social Security," co-written with G. John Ikenberry, the authors consider "how policy ideas about social insurance and other forms of public social benefits have been reworked over time as the carriers of these ideas dealt with the basic organizational features of the U.S. state structure and democratic polity." (p. 138) However, their portrait considers the American Association for Labor Legislation and key players like Edwin Witte and J.M. Rubinow, without examining the role women and notions of gender played in advancing the peculiar, two-tiered shape of the Social Security Act.

The last three chapters focus specifically on making connections between current and past strategies to deal with unemployment, health insurance, and poverty. Here, her aim to is illustrate that universal social welfare programs have had more success historically and cross-culturally than those targeted at the poor. Skocpol's analyses in these chapters are rich and illuminating, drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources.

This collection of work by one of the preeminent experts in the history of social policy makes valuable contributions to political science, history and sociology, harvesting the richness of each field to create a powerful analytical synthesis. It also offers many insights for policy makers that one can only hope will be considered.

Robyn L. Rosen Marist College