ABSTRACT
Welfare state politics are not political, not fundamentally or essentially. They begin in a basic orientation to the world—a way of conceiving man and the world and the relations between them. Ideas form there of the good and bad, the right and wrong; of how one ought to act and what others ought to do and refrain from doing so that one can live a good life, and the social structure that requires. Liberalism’s answers have been the consensus in America for decades. Some people object to the “basic ideas” approach. They say the ideas people need to consider are those that are most carefully thought out, richest in nuance. Anything else is just a primitive approximation, they maintain. Some believe the thinking people need to do about moral problems is the most nuanced they can manage. Others, that they need to think about the basic ideas.
