The Economic Turn
As early as 1948, Beveridges work on Voluntary Action signalled a total rejection of the notion of an all-encompassing state system, in which goals of social welfare were not merely important but sovereign. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) also suggested that the growth of the state in delivering welfare programmes threatened individual liberty. Economic theorists in the 1950s began increasingly to question the views of earlier economists that poverty led to weaker economic performance, so that social welfare needed to be pursued to enhance economic performance. No social welfare theorist adequately answered these questions, but social policy writings of the 1960s significantly shifted their ground either towards a different type of economic claim (e.g. that public welfare services tended to be much cheaper than private ones) or to move away from economic arguments towards other rationales for social policy, such as theories of the community and of justice. But these attacks on the expansive role for social welfare as a principle of social organisation have also led to a greater emphasis on individual responsibility and the reduction of the size and ambitions of the state. The movement back towards individualism was strongest in the US and in the UK in the Reagan-Thatcher period of the 1980s, and has been later and less pronounced in countries such as France and Germany.