Europe's Welfare Traditions Since 1500, Volume 1
Authors: Adams Thomas McStay 
Published: December 2023

Tracing the interwoven traditions of modern welfare states in Europe over five centuries, Thomas McStay Adams explores social welfare from Portugal, France, and Italy to Britain, Belgium and Germany. He shows that the provision of assistance to those in need has faced recognizably similar challenges from the 16th century through to the present: how to allocate aid equitably (and how to allow for social status); how to give support without undermining autonomy (the work activation dilemma); and how to balance private and public spheres of action and responsibility.

Across two authoritative volumes, Adams reveals how designers, administrators, and critics of social welfare have engaged in a constant exchange of models and experience locally and across Europe. The narrative begins with the founding of the Casa da Misericordia of Lisbon in 1498, a model replicated throughout Portugal and its empire, and ends with the relaunch of a social agenda for the European Union at the meeting of the Council of Europe in Lisbon in 2000.

Volume 1, which focuses on the period from 1500 to 1700, discusses the concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘tradition’. It looks at how the early 16th-century claims to modernity manifested themselves in the reform of welfare provision and how the theme of ‘discipline’ encompassed religious reform, the exercise of political authority, and the promotion of economic productivity.

Volume 2 examines the eighteenth-century bienfaisance which secularized a Christian humanist notion of beneficence, producing new and sharply contested assertions of social citizenship. It goes on to consider how national struggles to establish comprehensive welfare states since the second half of the 19th century built on the power of the vote as politicians, pushed by activists and advised by experts, appealed to a growing class of industrial workers. Lastly, it looks at how 20th-century welfare states addressed aspirations for social citizenship while the institutional framework for European economic cooperation came hesitantly to fruition.

European debates over provision for human welfare through the centuries revolve around a set of enduring ideas and values stated with remarkable clarity in 1526 by the Christian humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives in a treatise addressed to the magistrates of Bruges. Vives laid upon his fellow citizens the obligation to provide rationally for the relief of those in need, to promote the dignity of work, and to treat recipients of support “without hint of unworthiness.” This “Erasmian conscience” resonated in movements of religious reform from Luther onward, while municipal and territorial rulers took a growing interest in the relationship between political power and a productive, healthy population. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the gradual conquest of democratic citizenship thereafter amplified the call for beneficent and rational laws promoting the general welfare. Vives is but one in an extensive cast of characters featured in four chronological segments: ”Threshold of Modernity (to 1540);” “Discipline (1540-1700);” “The Grumbling Hive (1700-1850);” and “Intertwined Trajectories: The European Social Model(s) (1850-2000).” The narrative begins with the founding of the Casa da Misericordia of Lisbon in 1498, a model replicated throughout Portugal and its empire, and ends with the relaunch of a social agenda for the European Union at the meeting of the Council of Europe in Lisbon in 2000.