REGULATING THE UNCERTAINTIES OF INDUSTRIAL LIFE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL INSURANCE IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY, 1870--1914 (ECONOMY, HOUSEHOLD, STATE)

This study involves a theoretical, historical and comparative analysis of the part played by social welfare - social security policy in the reproduction of the working class under capitalism.;The historical part of the study examines the significance of various economic, political and social factors related to the introduction of social insurance in Imperial Germany and Edwardian Britain; the attitude of labour and capital to social insurance in both cases is also discussed. The early introduction of state insurance in Germany is interpreted as a result of rapid but late economic development, the rise of Social Democracy in the context of political autocracy, the weakness of liberalism and the legacy of patriarchal modes of welfare. The process of social reform in Britain is related to the relative stagnation of industry, the belated rise of an independent labour party, the limitations of Victorian welfare, the discoveries of the new social science and domestic concerns of imperialists.;It is concluded that the introduction of social insurance is a development dictated by the logic of capitalist development, with national variation in reform a function of the relative strength of working class political movements, previous modes of welfare and differences in political culture and institutions.;First, several Marxist and sociological theories of social welfare, reform and state intervention are discussed. Then a theory of the social reproduction of the working class is developed. The household is deduced from the peculiarities of labour power and the wage form of subsistence. Various structural crises which effect the reproductive capacities of households and which derive from the logic of capital accumulation are described. State social interventions are periodised with respect to these crises. As society becomes more economically articulated the uncertainties of industrial life are increasingly regulated through the state organized provision of substitute wages on the basis of social insurance.