ABSTRACT
In the liberal social sciences, the study of the state and social policy is guided by formal concepts. This chapter proposes that particular social policy measures and innovations should be conceived as 'answers' to neither specific demands nor perceived modernization imperatives generated by the problems of the valorization of capital. Von Ferber claims that West German kind of depiction of social policy – one that is defined exclusively by the disciplines of economics and law – results in a 'narrow-mindedness' in the practice and theory of social policy as it relates to individuals or small communitie. The anti-formal social-scientific approach is typically interested in the 'dictatorial element' that 'every bourgeois democracy inevitably bears within it'. If 'economic relations' compel anything, it is the invention of social institutions and relations of domination that in turn are not at all based on mute compulsion. A range of rationalization schemata may be detected in the object domain of social policy development.
