ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 (“The Politics of Social Protection”) begins by identifying the specific initiatives that constitute social protection, the varied agencies that deliver this protection, and the way in which the very need for social protection is ideologically and politically constructed. The discussion then proceeds to an extensive critique of Polanyi’s conceptual and empirical argument about social protection: namely, that the establishment of social protection resulted from the spontaneous act of all sectors of society to protect itself against the depredations of the market, a claim that was substantiated, he argued, by the historical evidence that all European governments, regardless of political ideology and state structures, implemented similar protection policies during the 19th and early 20th centuries. I maintain this argument is flawed because of its functionalist inclinations but at the same time, insist that the book actually offers an immanent perspective that is sensitive to institutional variation and historical discontinuity. This framework explores the extent to which the distinct nature of marketization and disembedding shape the nature of the countermovement and design of social protection. Finally, I consider the structural and historical limits to the design of social protection.
