This collection of twelve essays reviews the history of welfare in Britain over the past 150 years. It focuses on the ideas that have shaped the development of British social policy, and on the thinkers who have inspired and also contested the welfare state. It thereby constructs an intellectual...

"This ... new history tells the story of one [of] the greatest transformations in British intellectual, social and political life: the creation of the welfare state, from the Victorian workhouse , where you had to be destitute to receive help, to a moment just after the Second World War, when...