Work of Politics

"The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State examines the democratic and participatory potential of political struggles over social welfare institutions. Engaging with the thought of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as the comparative political economy of the welfare state, the book develops a critical vision of welfare institutions as worldly mediators between instrumental economic imperatives and collective political action. Welfare institutions, the book argues, provide crucial political avenues for democratic social movements challenging structures of domination in society. The book then illustrates the power of this approach by examining the history of German workers responding to Bismarck's social laws and Swedish feminists challenging gender domination in the post-war welfare state. Together, these theoretical and historical arguments answer fundamental concerns in democratic theory-and most centrally, of how democratic aspirations relate to state institutions and entrenched structures of social domination"--