ABSTRACT
The major and most influential attack on the Welfare State comes from those who recommend a shift to the strict reliance on the market. Underlying this attack is a meta-theory which posits sovereign individuals or families as rational, self-interested, utility-maximizers, who equipped with freedom of choice in the open market are able to consume the forms of welfare best suited to their needs. We have construed this shift as a struggle between two forms of welfare or social policy discourse based on opposing and highly charged ideological metaphors of ‘individualism’ and ‘community’. The one form posits the sovereign individual or family emphasizing its logical primacy over community and State; the other, what might be called a rejuvenated social democratic model, inverts the hierarchy of value to emphasize the primacy of community or ‘the social’ over the individual, arguing that individual rights, self-belonging and the construction of meaning are derived from, and conferred through, membership of a community, which is historically constituted through certain rules and institutions.
