“Welfare capitalism” and the “welfare state”. German discussions on capitalism from the standpoint of the social care of the working class

Abstract

The term capitalism can be considered to be both a designation of a specific historical epoch and an analytical tool in the humanities. This case study focuses on the second level of the term, specifically the usage of capitalism as an aid in the analysis of state and industrial enterprise strategies aiming at the social care of the working class. The text raises the question of whether a developed theoretical system of entrepreneurial strategies towards the working class as the discourse of welfare capitalism, for example, in the AngloSaxon countries did emerge in Germanlanguage historiographical discourse. Although the German scene worked with an associated term (Wohlfahrtskapitalismus), its intentions were fundamentally different to those of its AngloSaxon counterpart, due to the extraordinary emphasis on the state, which emerged as the chief guarantor behind the institutional basis of modernization processes in the economic and sociological theories of the German historical school. Although the postwar German Ordoliberalism vigorously denied primacy to central administration within the economy, the synergy between the state and social policy was always present at the theoretical and practical level. In this context the entrepreneurial class only had limited space to develop generally autonomous social policy, which was legislatively covered by state authorities in Central Europe.