Introduction

This chapter started life as a plenary paper for the 2014 Social Policy Association's Annual Conference on ‘Resistance, Resilience and Radicalism’, where I combined the themes of resistance and radicalism with work that sets out the development of a critical perspective in the discipline of social policy, past, present and future (Williams, 2016: forthcoming). Following a brief summary of the two sides of contemporary resistance, this chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part I suggest that it is helpful to go back to the 1970s and 1980s to identify the distinctive methods and concepts to have emerged from the critical perspectives of the welfare state at that time. By ‘critical’ I am referring to the sorts of critiques that place struggles and contestations over social justice at the heart of their theories, analyses and practices of welfare provision. This was defined succinctly by Marx as ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’ (Marx, 1843, p 209).

The second part reviews how critical analyses responded to the political and intellectual challenges of the 1990s and the new century, particularly those of neoliberalism and post-structuralism, respectively. It argues that, in spite of a downturn in grass-roots activism, there were some important conceptual developments that lay the ground for a more nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of power and resistance in relation to social policy. In the third part I propose that, in considering how to develop a politically relevant critical perspective for the 21st century, we might take a cue from contemporary forms of resistance and, in the light of the 2008 crisis, from new thinking about the ethical, economic, social and ecological basis for future society. One of my arguments is that many of the recent critical analyses in social policy have been travelling along rather discrete paths, and that what is needed are ‘conceptual alliances’ that can connect these developments to transformative alternatives for the future. By way of example I use ‘the Commons’ (and, more specifically, the ‘Welfare Commons’) as a conceptual node that can point to new synergies and directions.