ABSTRACT
The meaning of social welfare cannot be adequately grasped without a clear-sighted and painful recognition of the limits to possible change and betterment, and of organized welfare as the outcome of social and political struggle. This chapter shows that the project of social welfare is currently afflicted by particular imaginative restrictions, and that these are traceable to anxieties, fears, and imagined catastrophes of a specifically contemporary kind. Thus, one of the great unanswered questions of our times is how to recover a basis for authority in social affairs without resort to authoritarianism. In our experience, when health and social work teams and organizations ask for external training or consultancy, their relationship with complex and painful dependency is often the problem with which they are wrestling. The chapter suggests welfare is not best understood as the province of any single intellectual discourse— of politics, economics, culture, psychology or social theory and action.
