| Linking the question of welfare to subjectivity and civil society, this thesis develops a critique of dominant explanations of welfare state "crisis" and reform. Specifically, it demonstrates how the one-sided treatment of the relationship between civil society and the self in conservative, Marxian, post-Marxian and post-structural theory impedes rather than illumines the reasons for the varied trajectory of welfare in a comparative context. Building upon some neo-Hegelian themes in contemporary social theory, I re-conceive civil society's constitutive role vis-a-vis social subjectivity by drawing attention to its enabling and disabling role in relation to individual well-being. This reconceptualization serves to ground an alternative approach to the study of comparative political economy, including the varied trajectory of welfare in advanced industrialized societies.; By way of illustrating the theoretical argument developed in the first part of the study, the second examines in depth the case of welfare state capitalism in modern Japan. Against culturalist and developmental state arguments about Japan's welfare state exceptionalism, I show how the institutions and social practices of welfare in contemporary Japan may be better apprehended in relation to the notion of the self wrought within, and in relation to, the particular institutional shape modernity takes in Japan. |
