ABSTRACT
Social security entitlements and means tested benefits are the principal means by which modern industrial nations try to guarantee at least a minimal protection against misfortune. But they do not protect the specific relationships in which the purposes and meaning of someone’s life is invested-a job, a home, a marriage or a community. Typically, they compensate, sometimes adequately, sometimes grudgingly, for the loss of these relationships-with unemployment benefits, for instance, relocation grants, widows’ pensions, aid to children of single parents. They work least well for those most vulnerable to uncertainties, the poorest and most marginal, who are least likely to have earned their rights through contributions, and may have to prove their need through an incoherent and sometimes self-contradictory tangle of provisions. As Elliot Liebow writes, about services for the homeless,
To enter the system is to enter a world of uncertainty, where one may be treated with exquisite compassion one day and contempt the next; a world of hurry-upand-wait, of double binds and contradictions, where arbitrary and differential treatment, and myriad rules and regulations, triumph over the very purposes of the system itself.1
