ABSTRACT
This paper starts with a puzzle. Looking back on the literature on the welfare state published in the 1970s and the early 1980s (Moran, 1988), there is a striking asymmetry. On the one hand, there are the grim prophecies of crisis —if not worse-threatening the welfare state in capitalist societies. On the other hand, there is the almost total silence about the likely fate of the welfare state in communist societies. Yet if we look around us now, there is a very simple observation to be made. On the one hand, the welfare state in capitalist societies has survived the crisis in remarkably good health. On the other hand, the welfare state in communist societies is going through precisely the same paroxysms of reconstruction as the regimes that created it. It is a contrast which, as I shall argue in this paper, has some important implications for both the practice and theory of comparative social policy studies.
