Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figure
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Discipline, Community, and the Sixteenth-Century Origins of Modern Poor Relief
- 2 The Rise and Fall of the Workhouse: Poor Relief in the Age of Absolutism
- 3 Pauperism, Moral Reform, and Visions of Civil Society, 1800–1870
- 4 The State, the Market, and the Organization of Poor Relief, 1830–1870
- 5 The Assistantial Double Helix: Poor Relief, Social Insurance, and the Political Economy of Poor Law Reform
- 6 New Voices: Citizenship, Social Reform, and the Origins of Modern Social Work in Imperial Germany
- 7 The Social Perspective on Poverty and the Origins of Modern Social Welfare
- 8 From Fault to Risk: Changing Strategies of Assistance to the Jobless in Imperial Germany
- 9 Youth Welfare and the Political Alchemy of Juvenile Justice
- 10 The Social Evolution of Poor Relief, the Crisis of Voluntarism, and the Limits of Progressive Social Reform
- 11 Family, Welfare, and (Dis)order on the Home Front
- 12 Wartime Youth Welfare and the Progressive Refiguring of the Social Contract
- Conclusion: The End of Poor Relief and the Invention of Welfare
- Sources and Abbreviations
- Index
- References
8 - From Fault to Risk: Changing Strategies of Assistance to the Jobless in Imperial Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figure
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Discipline, Community, and the Sixteenth-Century Origins of Modern Poor Relief
- 2 The Rise and Fall of the Workhouse: Poor Relief in the Age of Absolutism
- 3 Pauperism, Moral Reform, and Visions of Civil Society, 1800–1870
- 4 The State, the Market, and the Organization of Poor Relief, 1830–1870
- 5 The Assistantial Double Helix: Poor Relief, Social Insurance, and the Political Economy of Poor Law Reform
- 6 New Voices: Citizenship, Social Reform, and the Origins of Modern Social Work in Imperial Germany
- 7 The Social Perspective on Poverty and the Origins of Modern Social Welfare
- 8 From Fault to Risk: Changing Strategies of Assistance to the Jobless in Imperial Germany
- 9 Youth Welfare and the Political Alchemy of Juvenile Justice
- 10 The Social Evolution of Poor Relief, the Crisis of Voluntarism, and the Limits of Progressive Social Reform
- 11 Family, Welfare, and (Dis)order on the Home Front
- 12 Wartime Youth Welfare and the Progressive Refiguring of the Social Contract
- Conclusion: The End of Poor Relief and the Invention of Welfare
- Sources and Abbreviations
- Index
- References
Summary
Unquestionably, the greatest risk faced by the wage-earning classes was – and remains – to be without work. The threat of joblessness was a source of intense existential anxiety for the working classes, and both workers and their employers were acutely conscious of the disciplinary power that flowed from the power of dismissal.
The history of assistance to the jobless in imperial Germany can best be understood in terms of the shift – slow, uneven, and ultimately only partial – from an individualist approach, which saw joblessness primarily as the result of sloth and regarded deterrence as the best means for promoting self-reliance and family responsibility, to a social approach to the problem. The social approach was based on the assumption that joblessness represented a risk inherent in the structure of the industrial labor market, and this new understanding of the problem made it possible to view the nation as a solidaristic community of wage laborers. It also pointed toward new social technologies that could be used to manage a risk that might randomly befall any individual member of this community: labor exchanges (i.e., employment offices) to diminish this risk and minimize its consequences, insurance programs to socialize that element of risk that could not be eliminated through such measures, and, at a chronological and theoretical distance, the management of aggregate demand for labor through what would later become Keynesian fiscal policy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
References
, Arbeitslosigkeit und die Entstehung der Arbeitslosenversicherung in Deutschland 1902–1927 (Colloquium Verlag, 1990), 20ff.Google Scholar
, Unemployment and Government. Genealogies of the Social (Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland. Zur Entstehung einer sozialen Kategorie (Campus Verlag, 2006)Google Scholar
, Anti-Social Policy. Welfare Ideology and the Disciplinary State (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).Google Scholar
, “Massenwanderung und Arbeitsmarkt im deutschen Nordosten von 1880 bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg,” AfS 20 (1980), 265–323, and Ritter and Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 175–97.Google Scholar
, “Mobilität und Sesshaftigkeit in deutschen Großstädten während der Urbanisierung,” GuG 15 (1989), 5–33.Google Scholar
, Arbeitsmarktpolitik und Arbeitsverwaltung in Deutschland 1871–2002. Zwischen Fürsorge, Hoheit und Markt (Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, 2003), 3.Google Scholar
, “Social Control and Forms of Working-Class Sociability in French Industrial Towns between the Mid-Nineteenth and the Mid-Twentieth Centuries,” in et al., eds., Social Control in Europe, 1800–2000 (Ohio State University Press, 2004), 25–69, especially 43ff.Google Scholar
, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar
, The Memory of the Modern (Oxford University Press, 1996), 121–41; Bettina Hitzer, Im Netz der Liebe. Die protestantische Kirche und ihre Zuwanderer in der Metropole Berlin (1849–1914) (Böhlau, 2006); and Jürgen Scheffler, “‘Weltstadt’ und ‘Unterwelt’: Urbanisierung, Armenpolitik und Obdachlosigkeit in Berlin 1871–1914,” Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 26 (1990), 158–81. Zimmermann, Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland, warns against seeing the development of new policies for the jobless as a direct response to socioeconomic change, while Jean-François Wagniart, Le vagabond à la fin due XIXe siècle (Paris, 1999), tries to close this gap between representation and reality by linking the intensification of the nineteenth-century war on vagrancy in France to the consolidation of power by the republicans.Google Scholar
, “Die Unzucht – das Grab der Völker”. Die evangelische Sittlichkeitsbewegung und die “sexuelle Moderne” 1870–1918 (Hamburg, 2002); Hitzer, Im Netz der Liebe, 355ff.Google Scholar
, “The Men's Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880–1914: Some Reflections on Politics, Sex, and Sexual Politics,” JMH 75 (2003), 59–110Google Scholar
, Krankheit, Sexualität, Gesellschaft. Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Steiner, 1999).Google Scholar
, “Der erste deutsche Armenpfleger-Kongreß und die brennenden Fragen des Armenwesens,” Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 6 (1882), 211–67, especially 261ff., and Adickes, “Die Verhandlungen von 1882 und die ferneren Aufgaben des deutschen Vereins für Armenpflege und Wohltätigkeit,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 7 (1883), 141–87.Google Scholar
, Ueber Beschäftigung arbeitsloser Armer und Arbeitsnachweis als Mittel vorbeugender Armenpflege, SDV, 4 (1887), 45ff.Google Scholar
, “Fürsorgepolitik zwischen Kirche und Staat. Wanderarmenhilfe in Preussen,” in and , eds., Soziale Reform im Kaiserreich. Protestantismus, Katholizismus und Sozialpolitik (Kohlhammer, 1997), 114–27Google Scholar
, Wohlfahrtsstaat und Provinz. Fürsorgepolitik des Provinzialverbandes Westfalen und des Landes Sachsen, 1880–1930 (Schöningh, 1993), 26ff.Google Scholar
, “Die Gründungsjahre 1883–1913,” in , ed., “Arbeit statt Almosen”. 100 Jahre Hilfe für obdachlose Wanderarme 1884–1984 (Verlag Soziale Hilfe, 1984), 23–35Google Scholar
, ed., Bürger und Bettler. Materialien und Dokumente zur Geschichte der Nichtseßhaftenhilfe in der Diakonie, Bd. I: 1854–1954. Vom Herbergswesen für wandernde Handwerksgesellen zur Nichtseßhaftenhilfe (Bielefeld, 1987)
, Zwischen Protestantischer Ethik, Unternehmerinteresse und organisierter Arbeiterbewegung. Zur Geschichte der Arbeitsvermittlung in Bielefeld vom 1887 bis 1914 (Stadtarchiv Bielefeld, 1991); and Emil Münsterberg and Alexander Elster, “Wanderarbeiterstätten,” in Elster, ed., Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, 3. Aufl. (1909/11), VIII:561–71.Google Scholar
, Vorschläge zur Vereinigung aller deutsche Arbeiter-Kolonien (Bielefeld, 1883), 7, 5, 22–3, 16, 45, 53, 60, 65.Google Scholar
, “Natural-Verpflegungsstationen,” Die Arbeiter-Kolonie 4 (1887), 238–42, cited in Pohl, Zwischen protestantischer Ethik, 59.Google Scholar
, “Die Verhandlungen des deutschen Vereins,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 8 (1884), 497–522; and Wilson and Victor W. Carlile, The Continental Outcast. Land Colonies and Poor Law Relief (London, 1906).Google Scholar
, Bessern und Verwahren. Die Praxis der administrativen Versorgung von “Liederlichen” und “Arbeitsscheuen” in der thurgauischen Zwangsarbeitsanstalt Kalchrain (Historischer Verein des Kantons Thurgau, 2005).Google Scholar
and , Zwangsmaßregeln gegen Arbeitsscheue und gegen säumige Nährpflichtige, SDV, 88 (1909)Google Scholar
Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen, SDV, 90 (1909), 8–61; Hermann Luppe, “Arbeitshaus,” in Ludwig Elster et al., eds., Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (1923), I:742–6; and the materials on the 1912 Prussian Arbeitsscheuengesetz in LAB A Rep. 003–01, Nr. 206.
, Das Bewahrungsgesetz (1918–1967). Eine rechtshistorische Studie zur Geschichte der deutschen Fürsorge (Tübingen, 2003)Google Scholar
, Welfare, Modernity and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton University Press, 1998), 243ff.Google Scholar
and , Die Einrichtung von Notstandsarbeiten und ihre Erfolge, SDV, 58 (1902); Ernst Bernhard, Die Vergebung der öffentlichen Arbeiten in Deutschland im Kampf gegen die Arbeitslosigkeit (Berlin, 1913); Faust, Arbeitsmarktpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 114ff.; and Schmuhl, Arbeitsmarktpolitik, 41–5. Measures for combating unemployment were a main topic at the first meeting of the Städtetag in 1903. See Franz Adickes and Otto Beutler, Die sozialen Aufgaben der deutschen Städte (Leipzig, 1903).Google Scholar
, Regulating the Social. The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton University Press, 1993), 176–87.Google Scholar
, “Selbsthilfe als Form der Solidarität. Das gewerkschaftliche Unterstützungswesen im Deutschen Kaiserreich bis 1914,” AfS 20 (1980), 147–93.Google Scholar
, and , Arbeitslosigkeit und Arbeitslosenversicherung in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1927 (Stuttgart, 1992).Google Scholar