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Merker: The Prussian Foundation of the Welfare State
The moral bedrock of the last millennium has been the other-regarding morality of Christianity. And that morality has continued to dominate society in the modern era. For the secular ethos of modernity is dominated by a secular version of the Christian other-regarding morality.
Be they believing Christians, secular citizens, or committed atheist, Western minds lend to equate moral action with the doing of positive good to others.
And by declaring our other-regarding beliefs, “we can be held to those principles by those who would subsequently challenge us to defend our stances, opinions, or acts.” For we are social animals: we can be shamed.
So we reach out to help those in need, and the needier they are the more the need for remedial action. Unfortunately, the mere belief in other-regarding benevolence does not necessarily lead to action that can “promote the good is it meant to accomplish”.
As this morality attaches to politics it becomes natural that “suffering-groups will be in competition for the benefits that are their due under this ethic”. If something must be done, the question is who is on first.
Thus the “enemies of promise” — Marxists, reformers, corporate interests, and those interested in “government contracts, subsidies, concessions, tax exemptions, tariffs, capture of regulatory agencies.. and… rent-seeking” get to work. The modern notions of “equality, freedom, and justice… can be invoked to legitimate special interest demands”. But the agendas of the competing interests will be resolved under the rubric of other-regarding morality, and will thus drive the politics of liberal democracies.
For instance, differentials in wages are bound to create perceived “distress, resentment or envy” among those getting the short end of the stick. “[R]ealism and prudence” may seek to limit the reach of other-regarding morality, but
in a culture pervaded by other-regard, the scales of justice are never quite impartial. The thumb of benevolence keeps weighing down on one of its arms, however slightly.
And once severe causes of discontent are brought under the protection of politics, others will soon seek “remedial measures in the form of legislation and government programs”.
To Merker, it all began with the issue of slavery. It began with abolition of the slave trade and moved onto the abolition of slavery itself. The movement provided a “striking image” of the potential of activism. Many abolitionists were women, and moved on to women’s suffrage, liberation and feminism.
But the issue that really transformed the role of the state was workers rights, or, “the social question”: what to do about the misery and suffering of industrialization, and who was to do it.
In Britain, the challenge was met largely by “private philanthropy and voluntary efforts, including worker self-help initiatives”, plus poor law reform, “labor legislation” and gradual increase in the franchise.
Was that enough? It didn’t matter, because Denmark and Germany decided to solve the “social question” with the power of the state.
A key influence was Lorenz Stein and his 1842 book Der Sozialismus and Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs that influenced Marx.
Stein made the case that the new class of the proletariat posed an unprecedented challenge to.. modernity itself… [Otherwise] the modern societal order… [would be] shattered by the industrial proletariat rising in revolution against it.
Stein argued that the industrial laborer would not be able to “achieve the material independence required for full membership in modern society” and so would resort to violence and overthrow.
It took a while for events to show that the workers were achieving independence through increased wages and overall prosperity. Even Marx admitted it in 1872. But meanwhile Stein proposed that the Prussian state should step in to solve the problem, and so, after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Chancellor Bismarck introduced government “workers’ insurance and social welfare programs… as a tactical measure to preempt socialist agitation.” It all went hand in hand with Germany’s rise to national greatness. Pretty soon Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries followed suit.
It is worth noticing how little any of this originated with or directly involved the industrial workers themselves.
For Bismarck it was all about defusing the danger of a rerun of the French Revolution. He had first tried repression of “political worker movements.” But when he launched worker insurance programs he encouraged the socialists to participate with him and “promote social reforms.” Thus, “the European welfare state is the offspring of imperial Prussian paternalism”.
And thus government transitioned from being “a necessary evil” to “a benevolent agency” — with the socialists inside the tent. We all take this for granted, but it is “a brand new experiment in statecraft”.
Lost in the enthusiasm to do something in the crisis of industrialization was the question of whether government coercion is appropriate for “socially desirable ends”. Instead everyone went along with “the century of the ‘expansive state’ in the West”. Only now, in the early decades of the 21st century is the project receiving some scrutiny.
More to come.
| Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:53:04 GMT |
Merker: Old Regime Overthrow and Aftermath
The First World War began with a local calamity, an assassination in the Balkans, realizing Bismarck’s prophecy that “one day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”
But it ended with the dissolution of four empires: Russia, Austria-Hungary, German, and Ottoman, and that
devastation opened windows of opportunity for every interest opposed to the previously established orders, cultural no less than political. Institutional dislocation gave them increased room to maneuver[.]
The Bolsheviks conquered Russia in a coup d’état in the midst of war; the Fascists conquered Italy and Germany after the war.
To Lenin, the seizure of power was the hard part; the rest was easy. Capitalism had “simplified large-scale production” to such an extent that “armed workers” could take over and “fill out the required receipts.” Oh Vlad, honey.
A key to understanding is that
With the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 the prospects of the partisans of overthrow everywhere underwent an abrupt and qualitative transition.
If Lenin and the Bolsheviks could take over the ruins of the Czarist regime, then anything was possible for a devoted activist. Lenin organized the Comintern to coordinate the efforts of “124 communist parties” and others from all over the world.
As Lenin put it, you never knew “which spark… will kindle the conflagration” that leads to regime change. So communists should “set to work to stir up all and sundry… to gain victory over the bourgeoisie”.
And “the partisans of overthrow” have stirred up all and sundry ever since in their quest for “the seizure of power”. Because “bending the arc of history”. And who succeeds at this? The “hardest of the hard”: the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Khomeinis.
There were plenty of efforts to establish “worker rule” after World War I, in Germany and Eastern Europe, but they all failed, because as World War I had demonstrated, the workers “overwhelmingly sided with their own nation’s cause in war”. Nationalism was the royal road to power, as Mussolini and Hitler demonstrated.
Communists and National Socialists were revolutionary rivals… They shared implacable contempt for liberal democracy… [and] competed for similar constituencies, particularly among the many unemployed[.]
Hitler and Mussolini fought for the nation; later on Stalin, I recall, fought for “socialism in one country.” And the key to power is to declare war on a small minority. Josef Hell found this out in 1922 in interviews with Hitler. First Hitler spewed his emotional hatred of the Jews. Then he sobered up and delivered his strategic vision:
[In all revolutions,] a struggle for ideals… for any kind of improvement, necessarily… must be supplemented by a struggle against some kind of social class or caste.
And The Jews, all over the world, tend to be a small minority. The skilled politician can unite the nation against that small minority for a quick win. See my Four Wars, and Grok’s analysis.
There is, of course, an economic difference between Communism and Nazism.
Politburo communism, then, can be defined in rough and ready terms as dictatorship dedicated to the abolition of private enterprise, while Fascism in the same terms amounts to dictatorship that tolerates or exploits private enterprise for its own ends[.]
Merker observes that of the three regime types that dominated the interwar period, World War II was a resounding defeat of Fascism by an alliance of Communism and liberal democracy. The Cold War was a conflict between the anti-fascist allies of World War II. Fascism, needless to say, continues to thrive in “post-Mao China, and post-Soviet Russia”.
It could be said that the three regime types existed as local experiments until the convulsions of the World Wars crystallized them. What we call “liberal democracy” was “wrung from the wages of two world wars.” The question remains:
[how] to convert Enlightenment ideas regarding freedom, equality, tolerance, and popular sovereignty into institutional arrangements in the West.
One key item is the gradual enlargement of the franchise. Today we take the universal right to vote for granted, but it is very new.
Historically, vast numbers of humans have lived under conditions in which a governing elite commandeers, by naked force of the threat of it, whatever surplus the population under its control produces beyond the mere means of subsistence.
Yet since the Enlightenment the idea has got about that “the exercise of governmental power is legitimized by “the consent of the governed”. The popular franchise would “wrest the reins of government from the hands of despots”. In reality,
The promise of rights or other general benefits can be used as what amounts to a bribe by those interested in using the consent of the governed to boost their own power[.]
And so
it is perhaps not surprising that a widening franchise has gone hand in hand with the massive expansion of the modern state.
The question is whether the universal franchise has really been a good thing. But there is this:
It is the only instance of practically realized absolute equality among individuals on record in human affairs.
But not, obviously, “equality of political influence”. Voters may be voting for a specific benefit, but in practice
they are placing a bid for exactly how the official use of the power of compulsion is to be deployed in the society they inhabit.
As Bastiat wrote:
Remember that law is force, and that, consequently, the proper functions of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force[.]
And we easily forget that everything delivered by government, whether despotic or democratic, involves “the official use of force in our lives”. You would think that
Fashioning… a civil order of peaceable social intercourse would seem a worthy challenge for the exercise of popular sovereignty through the franchise.
Instead we have seen “an unprecedented expansion of the peacetime state” into almost all domains of social life. And it was all pioneered by Bismarck’s Germany after 1870. A centralized state could be “an instrument of national greatness.”
It is no surprise that Communist and Fascist despotisms expand the power of the state. The question is why it also happened in liberal democracies. Is it low-income voters? Or women? In fact, it’s complicated, and Merker proposes to use “the trope of composite voter preferences” to analyze the “complexities of voting behavior outcomes”. And that is to say nothing about “the tug of war between British and Continental Enlightenment currents in shaping the world in which we live”.
| Tue, 25 Aug 2026 22:59:48 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. — Donald Kingsbury
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles — Sun Tzu
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: 1584 was the real "real" foundation of America, NHJ
