Werner Sombart asks two questions in Why is there no Socialism in the United States?: Why the United States, home of the world's premier capitalist economy, lacks a strong socialist movement, and why American democracy has not led to significant reforms in the interests of the working class. To Sombart, these are the same question because he assumes that without popular sanction democratically elected officials would never act as openly as America's have in support of capitalist expansion and against labor. Assuming this democracy, he can then draw conclusions about popular attitudes from political outcomes, causally attributing procapitalist state policy to popular procapitalist attitudes. Indeed, the juxtaposition of democracy and state policy leads to his central conclusion that “emotionally the American worker has a share in capitalism …he loves it.”

A complex relationship existed between working-class formation and the development of the welfare state in Imperial Germany between 1871 and 1914. In the 1880s, the Social Democratic party voted against the three major national social insurance law's, and many workers seemed to spurn the incipient welfare state. But by 1914, socialists were active in social policy-making and workers were participating in the operations of the welfare state. Tens of thousands of workers and social democrats held positions in the social insurance funds and offices, the labor courts and labor exchanges, and other institutions of the official welfare state. Hundreds of workers had even become “friendly visitors” in the traditional middle-class domain of municipal poor relief. This shift is interesting not only from the standpoint of working-class orientations; it also challenges the received image of the German working class as excluded from the state —an interpretation based on an overly narrow focus on national parliamentary politics.

When nineteenth-century liberals searched for reasons not to enfranchise the lower orders, they most often hit upon the argument that, once given the vote, workers would use it to elect governments pledged to redistribution and welfare at the expense of property. A cursory look at the political history of the twentieth century suggests they were not entirely deluded. Indeed, the most salient facts about political development since 1900 surely are related: The democratization of the political system allowed for the emergence of the working class as a distinct claimant to political power, and its presence within the polity somehow or another stimulated the enormous extension of the social and economic role of the state.

Of all state social provisions, education is among the most important. It also shows the greatest amount of variation among Western industrial nations. England and the United States, countries with many common intellectual and governmental traditions, with longstanding commitments to individualism and democratic forms of government, exhibit great disparity in education. Even today, the United States is by far the leader in the field of mass education while England occupies a position in the bottom ranks.