As I have said, my argument here aims first and foremost at defending “moral collectivism” and, most especially, the collectivization of ultimate responsibility for many aspects of people's material well-being. Any connection between that form of “moral collectivism” and “political collectivism” – policies pursued through some central state apparatus – is, as I have said earlier, a purely contingent one. Having said all that, I want now to show that that contingent connection is nonetheless a strong one.

There are good reasons, of a once familiar and still fairly standard sort, for pursuing certain sorts of goals through some sort of coordinated, collective apparatus like the state. My brief rehearsal of the early history of expanding state responsibility for social welfare is meant merely to remind us of those good reasons and to show that those reasons remain strong ones to this day.

Responsibilities get collectivized in the first instance and politicized in the second simply because that is the only realistic way (or, anyway, much the most effective way) of discharging them. If we take the responsibilities seriously in the first instance – in the first instance, even just as individual personal responsibilities – reflections on those contingent facts about the world as we know it should lead us to accept them ultimately as collective responsibilities to be collectively discharged through our political agencies.

Fault and the Folly of Disentangling Causes

In the bad old days of the New Poor Law – of workhouses and poorhouses – character tests served to differentiate the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor.