Quotes
Even as they maintained their free-market creed, British governments recognized ‘exceptional circumstances’ where protective measures were necessary and laissez-faire principles should be set aside. The regulation of factories, mines, and railways; the provision of public education; the promotion of public health and much else besides were areas that justified central government intervention. City governments did even more: providing clean water, sewers, and sanitation; regulating housing; providing public washhouses, libraries, and parks; and creating a form of ‘municipal socialism’ that stood in stark contrast to free-market principles.
This historical dialectic is what Polanyi famously called the ‘double movement’. On one side, the triumphant forces of laissez-faire liberalism, building a new society based on market freedom, private interest, and a minimal state; on the other, a widespread, diffuse reaction prompted by the pragmatic collectivism of various authorities who took steps to cope with emergencies, repair market failures, and manage the social upheavals caused by the capitalist juggernaut. In the USA, a similar process unfolded: an ideological commitment to laissez-faire and market individualism being offset by public welfare laws at the local level and large-scale disaster relief periodically doled out by the federal authorities.
welfare state government emerged as a functional response to the problems of urban, industrial, market societies—above all, to the new risks and insecurities generated by untrammelled market capitalism.
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