The focus of this book is on the development of Europe's three big ideas which have shaped approaches to social problems and social policy since the industrial revolution – liberalism, social democracy and Christian democracy rooted in Catholic conservativism. The book examines how laissez faire liberalism emerged to undermine the hierarchies and social contracts of the earlier ancien regime, how socialist thought about the inequalities sanctioned by early liberals gained influence and how conservative responses to both liberal and socialist ideals came to constitute a third distinctive response to modernity. Initial chapters examine the birth of laissez faire liberalism, the emergence of utopian socialism and Catholic responses to the social dislocations that followed in the wake of the industrial revolution at a time when a minority of citizens had the right to vote. Subsequent chapters examine the competing ideals and aspirations of reform liberals, neoliberals, social democrats and Christian democrats through a focus on the writings of the most influential intellectual champions of these respective recipes for the good society.

As influentially mapped by Gosta Esping-Andersen in his seminal Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), these ideological traditions vied with one another with different results in different countries depending, he argued, upon the relative appeal of each approach to electorates. The idea of worlds of welfare capitalism suggests not just different ways of thinking but also cultural and institutional histories. The ideological trinity examined in this book was borne out of epic conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism since the Reformation and between socialism and capitalism since the industrial revolution. At various times I describe these as vantage points (perspectives on social and economic change) or as roads (along which such changes might be navigated).

Each came to be reconciled, sometimes begrudgingly, with democracy. The great intellectual champions of nineteenth-century liberalism mostly opposed giving the vote to the masses. Europe's Christian democratic parties were built upon the foundation of Catholic thought that flirted, and more, with fascism. Social democracy emerged in conflict with anti-democratic forms of socialism and was forever conflated with this by liberal opponents of collectivism.

Three Roads to the Welfare State examines the development of enduringly influential ways of thinking about social problems.