This book is the result of a joint project that began in 2001. After having collaborated on a paper on the problem of welfare without work in continental Europe (see Hemerijck, Van Kersbergen, and Manow 2000), we began discussing some intriguing and unresolved big issues in welfare state research, particularly the incomplete – and therefore unsatisfactory – manner in which the role of religion in welfare state development had been studied. Although early work on the history of the welfare state had included illuminating analyses of the pro-welfare role (e.g., via democratization) of Protestantism, later work had primarily focused on the positive impact of social Catholicism as politically represented by Christian democracy on the European continent. We started to consider the possibility that it had been an unfortunate omission not to consider the impact of (social) Protestantism on the development of the European and the American welfare state more generally.

We took as our example the German case, and we argued that in the beginning the German welfare state seemed to have been a Protestant project. This project was then ‘ursurped’ and expropriated by Social Democracy and social Catholicism, as a result of which the bourgeois Protestant middle class, the initial reform faction, was alienated from the welfare state venture. The Protestant middle class responded, among other things, with the development of a new ‘Sozialreform’ doctrine, ‘Ordoliberalism’. However, Ordoliberalism – despite the label – was not a simple embracing of the liberal doctrine but contained substantial elements of interventionism with a social reform purpose. Ordoliberalism was concerned with social equality, social harmony, and decent living.