ABSTRACT
Since the mid 1970s the New Right in its neo-liberal form 1 has dominated the debate about welfare and social policy. It is natural that this should have been so in that the creation of an enterprise culture was bound to have some bearing on the future of the welfare state and was always going to involve a rethink of its aims and values. When properly presented, neo-liberal arguments strike at the heart of the normative assumptions of the post-war welfare state, and only if they are answered with the same rigour is it likely that the alternative view will recover the ground it has lost. The aim of this chapter is to consider the theoretical basis of New Right arguments in the sphere of values and principles, rather than the empirical case deployed against the welfare state, in order to subject these arguments to some critical analysis. I shall be concerned with a number of issues: with the relationship between welfare and freedom; social justice; the public choice critique of public sector interest groups; the status of welfare rights; the nature of poverty and dependency; and the role of the state in social policy. First of all, however, I will outline some of the common normative assumptions about the nature of the welfare state which the neo-liberals reject.
