ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the philosophical underpinnings of social welfare policy, political scientists Norman Fumiss and Timothy Tilton make the perceptive point that the welfare state has never had a distinct ideology of its own. The development of theoretical perspectives to analyze the historical growth of social welfare policy has likewise followed two main lines of thought that originate in the liberal and Marxist philosophies. In the former instance, “progressive” scholars have tended to see social welfare as meliorative in nature and as evidence of the expanding capacity of modern social institutions to respond to human difficulties. In spite of their predominance in the study of social welfare policy, neither the progressive nor the social control perspective has received sufficient critical examination. Insanity, poverty, physical disease, and crime are all dysfunctions within the social order that have received a variety of interpretations in the history of Western civilization.
