Reflections on the Welfare State

...In support of their complaints they cited the most recent statistics on divorce and suicide, the growing fashion of psychoanalysis among all classes, and the mediocrity of artistic and literary production—in spite of substantial public and private patronage...

...People have not yet forgotten what then happened in some towns of the Frosinate region...

...It is obvious that richer countries can appropriate more money to social welfare...

...Even this paradox is not new...

...men no longer think or stand alone...

...however, local authorities were very surprised when they began to receive requests for the subsidy from women who had been elsewhere at the time of the incidents...

...Consider the fate of democracy...

...State intervention is, on the other hand, imperative in the poorer countries as soon as they become involved in the problems of modern life, whatever party is in power...

...To attribute entirely to affluence the faults of the welfare state and of mass culture is at least a false generalization...

...It is difficult to explain why, in a region where "crimes of honor" are still frequent, mothers of families should falsely claim to have been raped—bringing as evidence the false testi mony of their own relatives...

...paid, disciplined, efficient and docile bureaucrats...

...It is certain, however, that the phenomenon, because of its very extension, is acquiring the character of necessity...

...Prosperity apparently serves mainly to satisfy the long suppressed hunger for cheap and coarse pleasures...

...Poverty could not have provided the motive...

...It is certainly not easy to explain some aberrations, like the one I shall describe below, solely by economic motivations...

...But this its mediocre representatives, suffering from chronic worship of the state, cannot do...

...Although for a century the terminology of the dialectic has been abused, few men understand the nature of contradiction...

...Although they did not divert me from what I was doing, these were not unimportant problems for me...

...About that same time General Juin, commander of the French armed forces in Italy, was received by the Pope...

...they do not have friends but only acquaintances...

...every woman, from ten to seventy, was raped...

...with others I had in common an unceremonious way of applying Christian morality to the history of our time...

...A welfare state, more exactly, is one which assumes the task of helping that part of the population not able to take care of its basic needs by itself—old and sick people, invalids, unemployed workers, victims of natural catastrophes, etc...

...Since it had been a sad experience and one not to be proud of, it was reasonable to expect that many of them would prefer to hide their misfortune...

...Stirred by homesickness and a political passion that I could not express in any other way, I wrote that story of poor southern peasants, and tried to describe the tragic, sometimes even grotesque collision between their still semi-feudal mentality and the new forms of exploitation and tyranny...

...but where wealth is fairly widespread and life is still sufficiently sane and dynamic, appeal to the state is not always necessary...

...Within the existing social system, we cannot do without the welfare state...

...Soup, Subsidy and the Welfare State The welfare state is one of the aspects of that broader phenomenon of our times, the growth of centralized power, which is due to causes operative not only in the richer countries...

...This unusual attempt to swindle the government was mentioned in the newspapers, but soon, for the sake of the good name of the nation, or, more exactly, the region involved, the scandal was suppressed...

...Nuclear energy for public welfare may be as frightening a perspective as the atomic war...

...There were men of different classes (artists, doctors, architects, Protestant ministers, craftsmen) and different beliefs, but they had in common some typically Helvetian qualities—hidden, to be sure, by an instinctive and sometimes even rough sobriety and a dislike of any form of ostentation...

...It is possible that this happened...

...One may explain this recent evolution of the state according to one's own preferences: as a result of Christian principles of charity, or of socialist principles of social responsibility, or as a prudential defense of public order...

...Just at the moment when philosophers have rediscovered the Hegelian concept of alienation, a complacent reality demonstrates it...

...Note that we are here talking of principles, and not of the struggles of parties which call themselves democratic...

...From all this, there result important changes in the relation between the citizen and public authority...

...The protected individuals of well-fed nations appear to us as massive, extroverted, boring and bored beings, the permanent objects of external solicitation...

...The only convincing explanation, in my opinion, is to be found in the new relationship between bureaucratic paternalism and the citizenry—a relationship which makes many people lose their normal psychical balance as soon as there is a chance of governmental assistance, whatever the amount, whatever the reason for its distribution.—[Reprinted from Tempo Presente, December 1960...

...Everyone who lives in close touch with the poor knows something about this...

...In my frequent discussions with these friends, it was impossible not to consider the possibility that the spiritual stagnation of which they were complaining was really a consequence of the collective prosperity, and that the same stagnation would result in any other country on the road to wellbeing...

...But in order to supply the neediest classes of society with everincreasing public assistance, the forces of democracy work to the advantage of the state, and thus to their own ruin...

...I am referring to the time when I began writing Fontamara, in the thirties, at the beginning of my long exile in the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland...

...Strangely, no politician has so far given his opinion as to the social consequences of this possibility...

...It would be difficult to imagine a contrast greater than that between the subject of my first novel (poverty and oppression in a village of southern Italy) and the social conditions of the country in which I took refuge...

...They denounced the vulgar hedonism—especially of the Swiss of the richer cantons— the mercenary neutralism, the infatuation with technology and the subsequent boredom...

...for in such a time, the tradition was that the survivors buried their dead and tried to manage by themselves...

...It is only necessary to remember that the most progressive welfare system—the English one—was conceived by Beveridge, a liberal...

...It was a modest but flourishing association with many members, mostly small land owners and craftsmen, whose families participated together in its lively recreational activities...

...This is particularly true wherever assistance assumes the character of bureaucratic paternalism...

...Memory becomes weaker...

...First of all, they seem to involve a serious confusion of three distinct notions: the affluent society, the welfare state, and mass culture...

...The size of the capital investment in consumer goods industries, from automobiles to phonograph records, from food preserves to clothing, makes it imperative that sales volume not be left to chance: consumer desires must be excited, directed, controlled...

...Social democracy stifles political democracy...

...Their perplexity is easily understood, for one is able to imagine how it would be possible to keep alive the Order and the Hierarchies (even the New Order and the New Class) in a society where the whole population is free from the burden of physical labor and is idle twentytwo hours out of twenty-four...

...The Negation of the Negation One can never be wary enough of the illusion of logical and consequential reasoning...

...And now, if, due to a heavy shower, somebody finds a puddle in front of his door, he does not even think of taking a shovel and filling the puddle—as his father would have done—but he writes to his representative...

...Their value, generally very low so far as poor people are concerned, cannot by itself justify the obstinacy with which the principle of governmental subsidy is defended...

...The result reminds us of the caricature that, until a few decades ago, liberal writers drew of the future socialist order: in medical records, death by tuberculosis would be replaced by death by boredom...

...The reply is simply that these are now, as never before, mass produced, like all other objects of common usage...

...One might conclude that the affluent society created by industrialism has all the faults of socialism without its advantages...

...I believed that they were problems to be dealt with when they became relevant—and it would be some time before the "cafoni" of Fontamara would have to cope with the inconveniences of opulence...

...It is not easy to predict how men will use the resulting surplus of energy...

...The major difference between modern and old-fashioned, conservative dictatorships is that the modern regimes must ape the socialists...

...In other circumstances moreover, these same people would be willing to spend far more money for the sake of their reputation...

...Mechanical progress has created machines which resemble men and corresponding social evolution fashions men who resemble machines...

...A brief parenthesis on the colonial problem is worthwhile...

...The state is no longer a "night watchman state," solely concerned with public order...

...In the spring of 1944, Moroccan troops of the French army entered the country...

...The Dog and the Electric Rabbit Since I was born and brought up in southern Italy, my first reflections on the situation of man in a rich, more or less equalitarian society go back only to my early adult years...

...It met serious obstacles, however, in distributing its subsidies —even in case of evident need on the part of the members...

...In Sparta public assistance was more developed than in Athens...

...And the familiar three F's of the political art of Bourbons (Feste, Farina, Forche—Feasts, Flour, Gallows) may also help us in understanding the welfare state...

...This sudden public response was a new, unforeseen and unforeseeable fact which both moved and surprised all of us...

...Together with some of them I mourned "the God that failed...

...This same sentiment manifests itself when in 1915, a few days after the devastating earthquake in the Marsica, help poured in from all over Italy...

...the reparation was so modest that it was very likely to be absorbed in the expense of the necessary documents and the inevitable lawyer...

...Many of the problems said to arise from affluence are in fact the typical products of the welfare state, even in poor countries...

...Even those politicians who are traditionally tied to nineteenth-century utopias prefer not to think about it...

...The over-protected man easily becomes a petulant and lazy man...

...But today, because of the earthquake, other misfortunes, and the work of the Civil Engineering Corps, that part of the country has become one of the strongholds of the welfare state...

...My awareness of this contrast was sharpened by acquaintance with a few Swiss...

...It seems instead that the unpleasant characteristics that often make the nouveau riche appear grotesque, are reproduced on a larger scale in nations which have attained economic wealth and security...

...One Step Forward, Two Steps Backwards Some of the memories of my adolescence revolve around a mutual aid society formed in my native town...

...Even the leaders are called "big wheels...

...vulgarity increases together with income...

...Welfare and Morality It has become impossible to count the voices criticizing a social order based on the idea of welfare...

...In its turn, the Italian government could do nothing but grant to the "Moroccanated" women a modest subsidy...

...These are warnings from the economically more developed countries against the illusion that cultural and moral advances derive from material well-being...

...Whatever the nature of the political regime, the manifold functions of a wealthy society tend to be directed by a class of anonymous, well...

...No party can avoid coming to grips with poverty, whatever its ideas about economic policy...

...The Pope complained to him about the immunity granted to the soldiers responsible for the brutalities...

...The state inter venes to remedy the dangerously unequal distribution of income and to restrain the disinherited classes from despair and riot...

...But the tricky question of the link between collective well-being and moral life remained a flea in my ear, all the more because it was an aspect of the more general relationship between social structure and cultural superstructure which was already at the center of my reconsideration of Marxism...

...At the same time, my Swiss friends were providing a no less harsh criticism of their own country's spiritual decadence...

...I also remember an argument among some of the executives of the society, guests of my family, on the most discreet way of overcoming the bashfulness of the poor...

...It would be useless to object that in every stage of historical development, there have been uniformities of behavior, fashion, collective infatuation...

...These ideas correspond to three different social conditions— which need not always coexist...

...It is not possible to accept such conclusions, however, without a word of caution...

...That was a hard tradition, unworthy of being mourned...

...Since it represents, first of all, the rights of society against the expansionism of the state, democracy should logically imply an order in which the concentration of power is minimized...

...The corruption of character brought about by bureaucratic paternalism is not the least of the evils which have arisen in recent years...

...The General informed him that North African soldiers could not be punished since the war code of the French army granted to these troops, in enemy territory, the right to rape and plunder...

...In Switzerland there exist forms of direct democracy that are, perhaps, unique in Europe, and poverty has for a long time been limited to exceptional cases...

...The main difficulty was pride, the native modesty which restrained many members, crushed by long illnesses and other misfortunes, from requesting the assistance to which they were entitled...

...Bureaucracy and Beggary Nobody has studied deeply enough the role of governmental subsidies in shaping the ideology of the welfare state...

...The episode deserves, nevertheless, to be recorded in the annals of the welfare state, as an extreme case...

...translated by SALVATORE SCHIAVO-CAMBO...

...All the women who did not have time to take shelter in the mountains were, as they say, "Moroccanated"—there was no consideration for the age of the women...

...it is necessary to protect pensioners from inflation, to indemnify peasants whose crops are damaged by hail, to send sickly children to summer camps, to encourage the building of lowpriced housing, to subsidize any number of other activities...

...It would be a mistake to assume this tendency to be typical of democratic states, since it now prevails also in dictatorial regimes, if for no other reason than as a demagogic reward for the deprivation of freedom...

...A society able to assist itself, to promote the welfare of its members, through a plurality of mutual and free associations, could also give life to the democratic principles of self-government...