ABSTRACT
Public usage of the "welfare state" term in Britain began in 1941, during a period when Britain was holding out virtually alone against threats from the German war machine. Britain in the 1940s and 1950s was exceptional in the history of European welfare state development in that intellectual conceptions formulated primarily by academic social scientists had an important impact on the development of social policy institutions. How equality of opportunity is juxtaposed to equality of results crucially affects how the discussion of welfare state boundaries is cast, and how countries are compared with regard to attainment of its goals. In one way it is strange that, according to the chronology which has now become conventional, the welfare state should have been growing for several generations before it was recognized and labelled by this name. But from a broader perspective on the historical introduction of new political concepts it is not so strange.
