ABSTRACT
Contemporary discourses of community have redefined poverty as a problem of social exclusion. Policies aiming to address poverty use 'the community' as the location for their implementation. They have this with the community politics which emanated from the new left in the 1970s and early 1980s. In this chapter, the author addresses the contemporary discourses of community legitimate today's welfare reform agenda by drawing on the democratic rhetoric at the same time stripping it of its political context. It is significant that both periods can be distinguished by a wave of popular sentiment concerned with the failings of democracy which policy advisers harnessed to legitimate transforming the institutions of the welfare state. Both periods located the failings of the welfare state in social security programs that drew on T. H. Marshall's more 'passive' interpretation of the 'social rights' of citizenship. Moreover, both eras of welfare reform focused their critique of the welfare state on T. H. Marshall's notion of 'social citizenship'.
