This three-volume compendium reproduces all the key texts on the welfare state - its rise and fall, its varying rationales and instrumentalities, its different forms in different periods and different places. Political history and social theory are interspersed with sociology and economics, and neo-liberal analyses sit alongside socialist and feminist ones, making for an invigorating blend of opposing perspectives. Anglo-American experiences are contrasted not just with those of Germany and Scandinavia but also with Japan and Taiwan, Italy and Hungary, Australia and South Asia, thus highlighting the many distinct styles of welfare states and the distinctive social, economic, political and cultural forces driving them. The juxtaposition of all the standard texts alongside many others which are deeply revealing but virtually unknown makes this an indispensable reference source for all serious students of the welfare state.

Originally published in 1987 Not Only the Poor explores the self-interested involvement of the non-poor in the welfare state, particularly the middle class. Using evidence from Britain, America, and Australia, they show that the non-poor were crucial in the founding of the welfare state, and in all three countries the non-poor benefit extensively from key welfare programmes, including those ostensibly targeted on the poor. Goodin and Le Grand conclude that the beneficial involvement of the non-poor in the welfare state is probably inevitable, but this may be no bad thing, depending on the alternative and on the nature of the egalitarian ideal adopted.

The Politics of the Environment brings together 25 classic essays on the political theory of the environment, ranging across environmental philosophy and political, social, legal and economic aspects of environmental action. Prefaced by an editorial introduction situating these materials in the context of the ongoing environmentalist debates, this collection provides beginners with a comprehensive introduction and specialists with a useful reference edition of widely dispersed materials on which any subsequent contributions must build.

Originally published in 1987 Not Only the Poor explores the self-interested involvement of the non-poor in the welfare state, particularly the middle class. Using evidence from Britain, America, and Australia, they show that the non-poor were crucial in the founding of the welfare state, and in all three countries the non-poor benefit extensively from key welfare programmes, including those ostensibly targeted on the poor. Goodin and Le Grand conclude that the beneficial involvement of the non-poor in the welfare state is probably inevitable, but this may be no bad thing, depending on the alternative and on the nature of the egalitarian ideal adopted.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work, analyzing the crossing of state boundaries by people and money, draws comparisons between the different ways that states treat inflowing money and people, demonstrating that states place many restrictions on the movements of people, but few on that of money. Yet, indubitably, many millions of citizens of the world would move to different countries if they could.

In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, "settling" seems like giving up. But is it? "On Settling" defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we'd all be lost without settling--and that even to strive, one must first settle.

We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle on some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, "On Settling" explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric--and why settling is different from compromise and resignation.

So, the next time you're faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It's no failure.

Our narrower obligations often blind us to larger social responsibilities. The moral claims arising out of special relationships--family, friends, colleagues, and so on--always seem to take priority. Strangers ordinarily get, and ordinarily are thought to deserve, only what is left over. Robert E. Goodin argues that this is morally mistaken. In "Protecting the Vulnerable," he presents a comprehensive theory of responsibility based on the concept of vulnerability. Since the range of people vulnerable to our actions or choices extends beyond those to whom we have made specific commitments (promises, vows, contracts), we must recognize a much more extensive network of obligations and moral claims. State welfare services, for example, are morally on a par with the services we render to family and friends. The same principle widens our international, intergenerational, and interpersonal responsibilities as well as our duties toward animals and natural environments. This book, written with keen intelligence and unfailing common sense, opens up new perspectives on issues central to public policy and of critical concern to philosophers and social scientists as well as to politicians, lawyers and social workers.

Some say that public policy can be made without the benefit of theory--that it emerges, instead, through trial-and-error. Others see genuine philosophical issues in public affairs but try to resolve them through fanciful examples. Both, argues Robert E. Goodin, are wrong.
Goodin--a political scientist who is also an associate editor of Ethics--shows that empirical and ethical theory can and should guide policy. To be useful, however, these philosophical discussions of public affairs must draw upon actual policy experiences rather than contrived cases. Further, they must reflect the broader social consequences of policies rather than just the dilemmas of personal conscience.
Effectively integrating the literatures of social science, policy science, and philosophy, Goodin provides a theoretically sophisticated yet empirically well-grounded analysis of public policies, the principles underlying them, the institutions shaping them, and the excuses offered for their failures. This analysis is enhanced by the author's discussion of such specific cases as the disposal of nuclear wastes and the priority accorded national defense--cases that illustrate Goodin's theoretical and methodological framework for approaching policy issues.

In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, "settling" seems like giving up. But is it? On Settling defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we'd all be lost without settling--and that even to strive, one must first settle. We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle on some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, On Settling explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric--and why settling is different from compromise and resignation. So, the next time you're faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It's no failure.

Injustices are, in the first instance, brute acts of identifiable individuals. But they are typically perpetuated, more subtly, through seemingly innocent workings of innocuous social structures. Critics of structural injustice are quick to call out that ruse. They say much about all the sites where such structural injustices reside - but without saying much, as yet, about how exactly structural injustice actually works. By what specific mechanisms are unfair advantages and disadvantages perpetuated? What, specifically, can we do to interrupt them? That is the focus of this book, in which Robert Goodin identifies several fundamental mechanisms of structural injustice: social position, networks, language, social expectations and norms, reputation, and organization. His discussion is deeply informed by a wide range of social sciences, mined with a philosopher's sharp eye to what matters and lucidly explained with a deft turn of phrase. Having exposed each of those specific mechanisms of structural injustice, Goodin proceeds to explore what they all have in common. The underlying drivers, he shows, are a combination of scale effects and attention scarcities. That combination limits - but also informs - what can reasonably be done to overcome the various, nefarious mechanisms that perpetuate unfair social advantage and disadvantage.

Over the past two decades public accountability has become not only an icon in political, managerial, and administrative discourse but also the object of much scholarly analysis across a broad range of social and administrative sciences. This handbook provides a state of the art overview of recent scholarship on public accountability. It collects, consolidates, and integrates an upsurge of inquiry currently scattered across many disciplines and subdisciplines. It provides a one-stop-shop on the subject, not only for academics who study accountability, but also for practitioners who are designing, adjusting, or struggling with mechanisms for accountable governance. Drawing on the best scholars in the field from around the world, The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability showcases conceptual and normative as well as the empirical approaches in public accountability studies. In addition to giving an overview of scholarly research in a variety of disciplines, it takes stock of a wide range of accountability mechanisms and practices across the public, private and non-profit sectors, making this volume a must-have for both practitioners and scholars, both established and new to the field.

Robert Goodin passionately and cogently defends the welfare state from current attacks by the New Right. But he contends that the welfare state finds false friends in those on the Old Left who would justify it as a hesitant first step toward some larger, ideally just form of society. Reasons for Welfare, in contrast, offers a defense of the minimal welfare state substantially independent of any such broader commitments, and at the same time better able to withstand challenges from the New Right's moralistic political economy. This defense of the existence of the welfare state is discussed, flanked by criticism of Old Left and New Right arguments that is both acute and devastating.

In the author's view, the welfare state is best justified as a device for protecting needy--and hence vulnerable--members of society against the risk of exploitation by those possessing discretionary control over resources that they require. Its task is to protect the interests of those not in a position to protect themselves. Communitarian or egalitarian ideals may lead us to move beyond the welfare state as thus conceived and justified. Moving beyond it, however, does not invalidate the arguments for constantly maintaining at least the minimal protections necessary for vulnerable members of society.

Public policy is the business end of political science. It is where theory meets practice in the pursuit of the public good. Political scientists approach public policy in myriad ways. Some approach the policy process descriptively, asking how the need for public intervention comes to be perceived, a policy response formulated, enacted, implemented, and, all too often, subverted, perverted, altered, or abandoned. Others approach public policy more prescriptively, offering politically-informed suggestions for how normatively valued goals can and should be pursued, either through particular policies or through alternative processes for making policy. Some offer their advice from the Olympian heights of detached academic observers, others as 'engaged scholars' cum advocates, while still others seek to instil more reflective attitudes among policy practitioners themselves toward their own practices. The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy mines all these traditions, using an innovative structure that responds to the very latest scholarship. Its chapters touch upon institutional and historical sources and analytical methods, how policy is made, how it is evaluated and how it is constrained. In these ways, the Handbook shows how the combined wisdom of political science as a whole can be brought to bear on political attempts to improve the human condition.

Norms are a pervasive yet mysterious feature of social life. In Explaining Norms, four philosophers and social scientists team up to grapple with some of the many mysteries, offering a comprehensive account of norms: what they are; how and why they emerge, persist and change; and how they work. Norms, they argue, should be understood in non-reductive terms as clusters of normative attitudes that serve the function of making us accountable to one another--with the different kinds of norms (legal, moral, and social norms) differing in virtue of being constituted by different kinds of normative attitudes that serve to make us accountable in different ways. Explanations of and by norms should be seen as thoroughly pluralist in character. Explanations of norms should appeal to the ways that norms help us to pursue projects and goals, individually and collectively, as well as to enable us to constitute social meanings. Explanations by norms should recognise the multiplicity of ways in which norms may bear upon the actions we perform, the attitudes we form and the modes of deliberation in which we engage: following, merely conforming with, and even breaching norms. While advancing novel and distinctive positions on all of these topics, Explaining Norms will also serve as a sourcebook with a rich array of arguments and illustrations for others to reassemble in ways of their own choosing.

In recent years democratic theory has taken a deliberative turn. Instead of merely casting the occasional ballot, deliberative democrats want citizens to reason together. They embrace 'talk as a decision procedure'. But of course thousands or millions of people cannot realistically talk to one another all at once. When putting their theories into practice, deliberative democrats therefore tend to focus on 'mini-publics', usually of a couple dozen to a couple hundred people. The central question then is how to connect micro-deliberations in mini-publics to the political decision-making processes of the larger society. In Innovating Democracy, Robert Goodin surveys these new deliberative mechanisms, asking how they work and what we can properly expect of them. Much though they have to offer, they cannot deliver all that deliberative democrats hope. Talk, Goodin concludes, is good as a discovery procedure but not as a decision procedure. His slogan is, 'First talk, then vote'. Micro-deliberative mechanisms should supplement, not supplant, representative democracy. Goodin goes on to show how to adapt our thinking about those familiar institutions to take full advantage of deliberative inputs. That involves rethinking who should get a say, how we hold people accountable, how we sequence deliberative moments and what the roles of parties and legislatures can be in that. Revisioning macro-democratic processes in light of the processes and promise of micro-deliberation, Innovating Democracy provides an integrated perspective on democratic theory and practice after the deliberative turn.

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure 'discretionary time': time which is free to spend as one pleases. Exploring data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Finland, they show that temporal autonomy varies substantially across different countries and under different living conditions. By calibrating how much control people have over their time, and how much they could have under alternative welfare, gender or household arrangements, this book offers a new perspective for comparative cross-national enquiries into the temporal aspects of human welfare.

'Justice' and 'democracy' have alternated as dominant themes in political philosophy over the last fifty years. Since its revival in the middle of the twentieth century, political philosophy has focused on first one and then the other of these two themes. Rarely, however, has it succeeded in holding them in joint focus. This volume brings together leading authors who consider the relationship between democracy and justice in a set of specially written chapters. The intrinsic justness of democracy is challenged, the relationship between justice, democracy and impartiality queried and the relationship between justice, democracy and the common good examined. Further chapters explore the problem of social exclusion and issues surrounding sub-national groups in the context of democracy and justice. Authors include Keith Dowding, Richard Arneson, Norman Schofield, Albert Weale, Robert E. Goodin, Jon Elster, David Miller, Phillip Pettit, Julian LeGrand and Russell Hardin.

The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism traces how individuals fare over time in each of the three principal types of welfare state. Through unique studies of Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, tracking individuals' socio-economic fate over ten years, the authors explore issues of economic growth and efficiency, of poverty and inequality, of social integration and social autonomy. The authors argue that the social democratic welfare regime of the Netherlands outperforms the corporatist German regime and the liberal US regime across all these social and economic objectives.

Problems of institutional design and redesign, structuring and restructuring, acquired particular poignancy through recent developments from eastern Europe to southern Africa. At the same time, scholars in each of several disciplines--political science, sociology, history and philosophy--have increasingly come to appreciate the important independent role that is, and should be, played by institutional factors in social life. In this volume, disparate theories of institutional design given by each of those several disciplines are synthesized and their peculiar power illustrated.

Problems of institutional design and redesign, structuring and restructuring, acquired particular poignancy through recent developments from eastern Europe to southern Africa. At the same time, scholars in each of several disciplines - political science, economics, sociology, history, and philosophy - have increasingly come to appreciate the important independent role that is, and should be, played by institutional factors in social life. In this volume, disparate theories of institutional design given by specialists in each of those several disciplines are synthesized and their peculiar power illustrated. Drawing upon traditions from Kantian ethics to public choice economics, from organizational sociology to discourse analytics, the contributors emphasize the important interpenetration of normative and empirical analysis in examples ranging from changes in the British welfare state through the reward structure of the modern university to the transition of eastern European societies.

Utilitarianism, the great reforming philosophy of the nineteenth century, has today acquired the reputation for being a crassly calculating, impersonal philosophy unfit to serve as a guide to moral conduct. Yet what may disqualify utilitarianism as a personal philosophy makes it an eminently suitable guide for public officials in the pursuit of their professional responsibilities. Robert E. Goodin, a philosopher with many books on political theory, public policy and applied ethics to his credit, defends utilitarianism against its critics and shows how it can be applied most effectively over a wide range of public policies. In discussions of such issues as paternalism, social welfare policy, international ethics, nuclear armaments, and international responses to the environment crisis, he demonstrates what a flexible tool his brand of utilitarianism can be in confronting the dilemmas of public policy in the real world.

Politically as well as philosophically, concerns with human rights have permeated many of the most important debates on social justice worldwide for fully a half-century. Henry Shue's 1980 book on Basic Rights proved to be a pioneering contribution to those debates, and one that continues to elicit both critical and constructive comment. Global Basic Rights brings together many of the most influential contemporary writers in political philosophy and international relations-Charles R. Beitz, Robert E. Goodin, Christian Reus-Smit, Andrew Hurrell, Judith Lichtenberg, Elizabeth Ashford, Thomas Pogge, Neta C. Crawford, Richard W. Miller, David Luban, Jeremy Waldron, and Simon Caney-to explore some of the most challenging theoretical and practical questions that Shue's work provokes. These range from the question of the responsibilities of the global rich to redress severe poverty to the permissibility of using torture to gain information to fight international terrorism. The contributors explore the continuing value of the idea of 'basic rights' in understanding moral challenges as diverse as child labor and global climate change.

Politically, as well as philosophically, concerns with human rights have permeated many of the most important debates on social justice worldwide for fully a half-century. Henry Shue's 1980 book on Basic Rights proved to be a pioneering contribution to those debates, and one that continues to elicit both critical and constructive comment. Global Basic Rights brings together many of the most influential contemporary writers in political philosophy and international relations - Charles Beitz, Robert Goodin, Christian Reus-Smit, Andrew Hurrell, Judith Lichtenberg, Elizabeth Ashford, Thomas Pogge, Neta Crawford, Richard Miller, David Luban, Jeremy Waldron and Simon Caney- to explore some of the most challenging theoretical and practical questions that Shue's work provokes. These range from the question of the responsibilities of the global rich to redress severe poverty to the permissibility of using torture to gain information to fight international terrorism. The contributors explore the continuing value of the idea of "basic rights" in understanding moral challenges as diverse as child labor and global climate change.