Welfare policy reform is widely researched, but culturally unexplored. In public policy and political science, welfare policy reform is a cacophony of research and recommendations, plans and evaluations, cross-country comparisons and longitudinal studies, all tied to particular places and times, with perennial problems in want of solutions. Such work involves complex compromises between competing imperatives, and what is actionable by a government in the policy mix is invariably a tried and trusted upcycling of existing approaches. Our book is not a contribution to policy, nor a critique of contemporary welfare policy as neoliberal or paternalist, important as such work is, nor is this chapter a history of policy reform. Rather, our ambition is to explore how the idea and practice of ‘reform’ encodes a distinctive theological inheritance, inter alia .

Broadly we argue that considering welfare policy as a ‘governmentalizing’ power, with an assemblage of definitions which classify individuals as unemployed (Boland and Griffin, 2015), explains much of how welfare policy works, but does not explore its whys and wherefores – or what it means. In this chapter we explore the deeper formulation of problems that foreshadow their solution, as a theological impulse to reformat people and the polity at large.

Welfare is broadly an anti-revolutionary construct (Ewald, 2020), an insurance against unrest that guarantees the state's existence, maintenance and adaptation. This idea follows in the footsteps of Machiavelli's originality as a prophet of policymaking with a deep understanding of instrumental, managerialist political thinking, and his general concern for political continuity through internal stability (Berlin, 1974). In his lesser known Florentine Histories , he dispassionately considers the Ciompi Revolt, an insurrection of the lowest stratum of Florentine working classes (1378), which led to revolution, the overthrow of the elite and instituting of a radical democracy. Machiavelli departed from the historical orthodoxy of Bracciolini, who suggested the insurrection was God's wrath on the city, and Bruni who had little sympathy for the violent criminals or for treating the revolt as a political movement (Winters, 2012). Machiavelli retells the story as a lesson: an excess of poverty can spill over into political violence which can even topple the Medici dynasty for a while, something every leader must keep under a keen eye.