Neoliberal paternalism in welfare traces back to 1930s European neoliberals, not 1980s social conservatism

Evidence

It has often been noted that a liberal revival that came to prominence as a critique of the paternalism of the welfare state ended up expanding state involvement in the welfare system. Neoliberal welfarism, critics note, enlists the state to coerce welfare recipients into the worst, lowest-paid jobs and subjects them to invasive supervision and income-management. Such ‘neoliberal paternalism’ is often understood as the product of a tactical alliance between free-market neoliberals and family-values social conservatives who found common cause in opposition to the ‘ungovernability’ of the social movements of the 1960s. But the social conservatism of a figure like Lawrence Mead, whose ‘new paternalism’ inspired US workfare policies, was prefigured decades earlier by European neoliberals. Mead’s 1986 exhortation that the state must demand ‘acceptance of the verdict of the market place’ was central to neoliberal discussions of welfare from the 1930s. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on sacrifice and social discipline, and to broader debates on how neoliberal thought reconciles state coercion with free markets. — connects to: Neoliberals abandoned economic measurement for institutional design after the 1930s — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 76; Family loyalty is central, not marginal, to American neoliberal welfare theory — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 213; Reagan’s California welfare reform enacted neoliberal family-responsibility policies — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 242 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: How much of the punitive-workfare genealogy gets narrated as an American 1980s phenomenon when its intellectual roots are 1930s European?

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism’s core concepts formed in the 1930s through networked institutions #expands (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 352