ABSTRACT
Institutionalists like Rexford Tugwell and John Kenneth Galbraith have long argued that the state plays an important role in providing for economic security in modern industrial economies. During the Reagan presidency it became fashionable to talk about economic security in terms of the so-called social safety net. This metaphor was intended to do more than describe the American social welfare state. It was intended to dismantle it. To speak of economic security as something that “catches” the individual just prior to destruction, is to communicate a particular ideological position with regard to the state’s role in providing for economic security. Economic security entails a socially defined subsistence level of real income for all individuals, constructive policies intended to maintain macroeconomic stability, and provisions for individual and social development. Providing economic security is possibly the most intractable problem modern industrial culture has faced. American society has inadvertently experimented with some aspects of the necessary attributes of participatory structures.
