ABSTRACT
The expanding functions of the nation state, including its welfare functions, has been one of the central features of twentieth-century history. So much so that when, in Britain in the 1980s, governments were committed to ‘rolling back the state’, denying reciprocal commitments among citizens (because as Mrs Thatcher stated ‘there is no such thing as society’, individuals are self-interested competing individuals) social expenditure kept rising and the real scope of state action did not diminish, though it changed its form in certain respects. Indeed at a time when government anti-state rhetoric was more explicit than for at least fifty years past, Britain proceeded further along the path to tightly controlled centralization to become arguably the most centralized state in western Europe.
