The story recounted in the preceding pages has had to be lengthy and detailed, for the emergence of a ‘politics of retirement’ was complex. Nevertheless, several analytical themes can be picked out and presented in conclusion.

The spread of modern ‘jobless’ retirement and the accompanying campaign for state old age pensions belonged to that period of ‘organised’ capitalism which began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was characterised by the dominance of mass production in large-scale manufacturing enterprises, relative job security for working people, the growth of ‘scientific’ management in the workplace (in which mandatory retirement played an important part), clear political distinctions between ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘labour’ and ‘capital’, Keynesian welfare states located within nation states, and so on. This period thus saw the emergence of old age as a social ‘problem’ – increasingly scrutinised by social investigators, economists, demographers and gerontologists – and of the ‘life-cycle’ as a series of discrete periods. Changes in labour market demand were crucial, and accounts of retirement which prefer to emphasise supply-side, behavioural or rational choice models are deficient. Certainly, once demand-side factors began to operate, then human beings made ‘choices’ from the range of options available to them. Most notably, the trades unions campaigned hardest for an ‘adequate’ pension which would recognise the ‘citizenship’ worth of ‘the veterans of industry’ displaced from the labour market, and bestow upon them an ‘honourable retirement’. But these choices were severely constrained by the economic realities that already existed, determined by labour market trends.