What's so new about social investment? Evidence from the history of the Danish welfare state

Abstract

Social Investment is heralded as a new social policy logic that views present social expenditure in light of future benefits for a greater good. Seeking to qualify the discussion of the historical status and development of Social Investment logic(s), this article asks the question: Is the social investment logic new? Taking the critique of Social Investment as utilitarian as a starting point, we trace and analyse historical logics in the formative decades of the Danish welfare state ca. 1880–1940 by investigating four important and controversial social policies: (1) The role of economics in the 1891 old age pension reform, (2) turn of the century uses of Christian discipline, (3) the landmark 1933 social reform, and (4) the eugenic program of the 1920s and 1930s. We apply problem analysis to key texts of protagonists of the Danish moral elites in the period: Harald Westergaard and Karl Kristian Steincke. Our results show the historical presence of utilitarian concerns similar to contemporary Social Investment logics tied to heterogeneous and conflicting cultural, social, humanist, religious, and biological concerns. Broadly understood, the Social Investment logic is not novel. However, analyses of utilitarian logics infiltrating welfare must be qualified by showing the intersections among heterogeneous concerns.

Keywords

Social investment social policy welfare state historical sociology problem analysis moral elites eugenics

Introduction: Is the social investment logic new?

Some scholars have portrayed social investments (SIs) as a new paradigm for European and American social policy (Hemerijck, 2015). Where the Keynesian paradigm sought to steer the conjunctures and structural displacements of the national economy, and the neoliberal paradigm turned its focus to supply-side policies and budget control, the SI paradigm advances ‘a new understanding of social policy as a productive factor’ (Morel et al., 2012: 2). In the literature, the SI paradigm is described as seeking to address the challenges of dynamic ‘knowledge economies’ through policy instruments devised to ‘prepare’ citizens for labour market participation (rather than ‘repair’ them, Morel et al., 2012) and to construct institutional arrangements that serve as stabilizing ‘buffers’ vis-à-vis individualized risks, advance the ‘stock’ of human capital in the population, and facilitate the transitory ‘flows’ in and out of the labour market and across jobs and sectors (Hemerijck, 2015).

Scholars disagree about whether SIs constitute a paradigm shift, just as they hold different positions on whether SIs are a continuation of or a break with the rights-based welfare states. While one strand of literature views SI as a policy innovation that allows the de-commodified welfare states to survive (Esping-Andersen, 2002), another critical strand considers it a ‘narrow and utilitarian political discourse’ (Hemerijck, 2017b: 15). Utilitarianism is not defined in these debates, but the term is used to designate policies that subsume social rights of the individual under the greater good of the population or ‘the economy’. This is expressed through concerns of economic ideas of efficiency and incentives sidelining social rights and universalism (Berman, 2022; Michel, 2015), and at a practical level a tendency to view social worth in light of economic worth (Andersen and Kessing, 2019; Hemerijck, 2017a). In other words, the critique of SI as utilitarianism not only relates to the economization of social policy but also to the instrumentalization of social policy for purposes beyond the good of the recipients of social benefits.

In this article, we investigate a key question in this debate: Whether the SI logic is indeed new. Our motivation for so doing is not merely based on a desire for historical accuracy. Our more pressing motivation is to qualify the debate over the SI logic by exploring historical social policy logics with a utilitarian and infiltrating potential. Our aim is to get a clearer sense of the concerns, uncertainties, problems, and controversies that surround those social policy logics. A historical analysis of situations in which existing logics were ‘threatened’ by a newcomer can help put the present controversies over SI in perspective and illuminate potentials and pitfalls. We thus ask the question: Is the SI logic new?

In this historical study, we aim to shed new light on ‘social investment in action’ by exploring the broader networks of problems and concerns of social policy in a given context and time. Specifically, we seek to illuminate how SI rationales (in the critics’ broader sense of the term) emerge in social policy debates and how they relate to political, ethical, and practical concerns. We focus on the foundation of the Danish welfare state in the decades from circa 1880 through 1940, conducting problem analysis (Krarup, 2021) of texts related to four debates in which the critique of utilitarianism – understood broadly as the suppression of individual rights under appeals to a greater good – are particularly likely to occur: (1) the emergence of new economic-statistical methods in relation to poor relief; (2) the moral concerns of Christian social work; (3) the landmark social reform of 1933; and (4) the eugenic program of the 1930s. Each event touches upon different dimensions of the critiques that have been voiced in relation to SI.

As a way of opening the exploration of the debates and rationales involved in the four cases, we focus on the texts of two intellectuals deeply engaged in social policy and with a lasting commitment to public and political debate, representing the philanthropic and the social democratic period, respectively: Statistics Professor and Christian socialist Harald Westergaard and Social Democratic Minister of Social Affairs Karl Kristian Steincke (1880–1963). While sometimes approached as founding fathers of the modern welfare state (Cornell, 1982; Sevelsted and Lunding, 2022), we approach them rather as members of a moral elite who engaged very broadly in discussions about problems, concerns, and solutions of social policy. Inspired by Stephanie Mudge (2018: xvii), the two are considered ‘more like prisms than pinballs’. In other words, we read their works as engagements in public debate with problems of broader concern in society that allow us to trace relationships among political, ethical, cultural, religious, and other issues. While certainly not qualifying as a comprehensive account of social policy debates during the period, the spectrum of the two intellectuals does yield a glimpse of the complexity of problems and concerns at stake.

The article proceeds as follows. We first position our contribution in the history of the SI logic and discuss our methodology and selection of sources. We then proceed to the analysis, divided into the two periods of circa 1880–1910 and 1910–1940 with Westergaard and Steincke in focus, respectively. In the conclusion, we reassess our understanding of the historical roots of the SI logic and discuss how our analytical approach may inform studies of the present.

Social investment now and then

The notion of SI was first introduced at the turn of the millennium as a way of legitimizing expansive welfare states threatened by welfare retrenchment and austerity measures (Esping-Andersen, 2002). By viewing social expenditure not merely as expenses, but as investments, welfare state protagonists would have a powerful argument against deep cuts to the social budget: Generous social budgets are key to strong economies able to take up global economic competition (OECD, 1997). As described by Morel et al. (2012), SI was part of a broader trend in Western economies differently labelled as a move from welfare to workfare, the enabling state, or inclusive liberalism – pushed forward by the perceived need for a skilled and flexible workforce in the new ‘knowledge economy’.

In the literature, the SI approach is described as seeking to address the challenges of dynamic ‘knowledge economies’ through policy instruments devised to ‘prepare’ citizens for labour market participation (rather than ‘repair’ them, Morel et al., 2012) and to construct institutional arrangements that serve as stabilizing ‘buffers’ vis-à-vis individualized risks, advance the ‘stock’ of human capital in the population, and facilitate the transitory ‘flows’ in and out of the labour market and across jobs and sectors (Hemerijck, 2015).

It is a continued discussion in the SI literature whether and to what extent SI is new. Some argue that SIs represent a paradigmatic break with neoliberalism and Keynesianism (Van Kersbergen and Hemerijck, 2012; Hemerijck, 2013). Where the Keynesian paradigm sought to steer the conjunctures and structural displacements of the national economy and the neoliberal paradigm turned its focus to supply-side policies and budget control, the SI paradigm advances ‘a new understanding of social policy as a productive factor’ (Morel et al., 2012: 2). A similar view, albeit with a different valuation and without invoking the paradigm term, view SI as a break with neoliberalism based on an emerging anti-poverty perspective (Jenson, 2010). In the Danish context, two social democratic ministers have embraced the SI language to further such an understanding: the macroeconomic models of the Ministry of Finance today are decisive for what policies become adopted by Parliament but these models do not account for the ‘dynamic effects’ of SI in welfare – thus, daring to assign monetary values to social outcomes will not only increase the scope for welfare policies but also incentivize strengthened dialogue between social and fiscal policies (Halsboe-Jørgensen and Rosenkrantz-Theil, 2018).

There are, however, also scholars who acknowledge that while SI – here understood as a type of social policy that is based on an economic productivity rationale – may be new, it has in fact historical precursors. Midgley (2017: 13) has noted that ‘the paradigmatic conceptualization of SI by Western social policy scholars as a new “welfare state regime” fails to capture the nuances and complexities of the issues’. One Nordic precursor is found in how Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in 1930s Sweden argued for welfare benefits to be not only just but also productive, e.g., childcare would enable women to enter the workforce (Morel et al., 2012). Others point to even earlier examples such as the early 20th century concern with ‘population quality’ and the need to address this through social policy (Midgley, 2015). Michel (2015) goes a bit further back and points to Kate Douglas Wiggin, an American children's author and advocate of early childhood education, who argued that improving education for young children could have beneficial economic effects in the long run. However, these qualifications of the unidirectional history of the SI logic around 2000 remain cursory and have not yet been unfolded through historical analysis. A historically substantive study, Martin and Chevalier (2022), offers a deep history of anti-poverty discourses (1770–1920) and suggests that SI logic can be found even before the emergence of the modern welfare state, for example in Denmark where political and cultural elites have long viewed the peasantry as critical to national economy, political stability, and social cohesion. The authors, however, locate anti-poverty discourses in works of fiction rather than policy debates.

As seen from these examples, writing the history the SI logic is not as straightforward as the thesis about its emergence around the turn of the millennium suggests. One problem concerns the importance one ascribes to the more consistent adoption of economic vocabulary and – to a certain extent – economic models relative to that of broader and older economic concerns not just for the immediate costs but also the long-term sum of benefits of social policy. Thus, in raising the question about the novelty of SI logic, we also ask more profound analytical and historical questions about what qualifies as such and about the co-existence of and interaction among multiple logics in social policy. In addressing these questions, it is relevant to take a step back and consider the concerns raised by critics of the SI logic.

While proponents have defended SI by referring to contract theory (Morel and Palme 2017), critics see a risk of utilitarianism (see Hemerijck, 2017b: 15). As mentioned above, although the concept of utilitarianism has a long philosophical and practical history, we use it here in the same broad vein as the SI critics: to designate instances in which individual rights and dignity are valued in so far as they contribute to a future greater good (the nation, the race, the economy, an improved self, etc.). Most starkly, this utilitarianism entails that groups from whom no ‘return on investment’ can be expected are neglected: ‘if social policy is founded on the assumption that employment is a fast-track to social inclusion […] a genuine problem arises concerning the social protection of those people who cannot be integrated into the labour market’ (Cantillon and Van Lancker, 2013: 555) – for instance the disabled. Similarly, investments in childcare are potentially only valued for their economic productivity at the expense of the value of parental care in the context of the household: The ‘vision of gender relations presented is an instrumental one’ (Jenson, 2009: 468, see also; Saraceno, 2015, 2017). Further, SI is criticized for making social policy recipients internalize this consequentialism, thus making them responsible for their own rentability, which in turn risks blurring the distinction between effort and circumstance (Cantillon and Van Lancker, 2013: 557ff). As a consequence, SIs reinforce social inequalities as the well-off are better able to reap the benefits, for example, of childcare to pursue a career than those on the margins of the job market (Cantillon and Van Lancker, 2013: 559). SI thus weakens traditional passive social protection and re-commodifies social relations (Cantillon, 2011; Vandenbroucke and Vleminckx, 2011).

Utilitarianism is viewed as simultaneously expressed and masked in the very language of SI: ‘A significant risk with the social investment perspective is that it masks the normative basis on which such social choices need to be made, giving the impression that they “fall out” from an economic analysis’ (Nolan, 2013: 466). Essentially, an ‘economic style’ akin to cost-benefit analyses that sidelines other ‘styles’ of reasoning such as social rights thinking (Berman, 2022). Thus, ‘one can see how a social investment rationale […] could lead to the displacement of democratic or altruistic social values by those of the market’ (Michel, 2015: 373).

We can thus distil at least three dimensions of the concern that the SI logic is a utilitarianism that values only productive citizens: First, SI leaves to the side those who are not able to become productive citizens. Second, non-economic values, logics, and spaces are neglected in policy design. Finally, target groups are stigmatized as they internalize the productivity rationale. In light of these critiques, a historical exploration of SI logic, it is thus not enough to look for ‘economization’ of social policy in the shape of cost-benefit terminology and econometric modelling. We must also look broader at instances in which instrumentalism and utilitarianism infiltrate social policy in ways that are potentially threatening to other logics – in particular of social rights but also other, e.g., religious, moral, or cultural logics. We are not simply looking for clear-cut advocates of SI logic, but also for concerns, controversy, and problems of subsuming social policy to utilitarian formats. By the same token, any concern (e.g., budgetary) with uncontrolled costs of social policy is not enough in itself to qualify as (a precursor to) SI logic. Indeed, SI language serves as a justification for costs based on future benefits (even if uncertain and hard to account for).

In sum, our historical exploration is not only undertaken in pursuit of precursors – that is, of straightforward advocates of primordial versions of cost-benefit analysis in social policy – but also of uneasiness, uncertainty, and debate over how to integrate recognized utilitarian justifications with other relevant or prevalent moral logics.

An archaeology of social policy problems

Our analysis thus brackets the claim that SI logic constitutes a paradigmatic break in social policy in favour of an archaeological survey of how different concerns, problems, and logics have been interwoven in different ways over time. Indeed, studies have shown that social policy often addresses multiple concerns at once (Carstensen and Hansen, 2019; Paulsen Hansen, 2019). In other words, in order to answer the question of whether SI logic is new, we seek to avoid the anachronistic approach of searching the past for a predefined list of characteristics identified in the present, attempting to assess the degree of similarity between the former and the latter. Instead, we set out to explore anew the historical development of social policy problems and logics by comparing in a selection of instances the co-existing claims, arguments, and concerns (Krarup, 2021, 2024).

For this purpose, we set out to analyse the multiplicity of interlinked economic, cultural, religious, political, and other problems in social policy debates, seeking to understand the webs of stakes and concerns. In so doing, we draw broadly on problem analysis approaches focused on the assemblage of policy problems from heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory concerns and solutions (Bacchi, 2017; Barry, 2021; Krarup, 2021). We aspire, first, to understand the specific tensions that emerge from such an assemblage of heterogeneous concerns and, second, to situate SI rationales within that assemblage of motivations, justifications, critiques, and controversies. In focusing on debates, our study is limited from, for example, legislative processes and street-level practices.

We focus on the period from circa 1880 through 1940 – a time that saw not least the poor relief reform of 1891 and the social reform of 1933. The intervening years are ripe with landslide developments in Danish politics. Notably, decades of struggle for de facto parliamentarism finally succeeded in 1901; with the 1915 constitution, suffrage was extended to large groups including servants, women, and the poor (but still excluding recipients of poor relief); and the Social Democratic Party grew from its urban niche to become the largest party in parliament and the leader of coalition governments. Traditionally, the 1933 social reform has been viewed as the birth of the modern Danish welfare state, introducing universal rights to replace the older system of public and private alms and charity based on the moral assessment of the individual (Kolstrup, 2011). However, more recent historical accounts tend to view the 1933 reform not so much as a radical break as a simplification and further development of existing legislation – for example, extending the use of insurance-based instruments and still excluding certain groups, such as alcoholics, tramps, and the ‘work-shy’. Decades earlier, the poor relief law of 1891 had introduced public support for medical assistance and old-age pension for the ‘worthy poor’ who had not received poor relief for the past 10 years (Baldwin, 1989). Rather than settle when exactly the modern Danish welfare state was born or decide on which criteria to use for the purpose, we take the period ca. 1880–1940 as marking its early formation and development.

Specifically, we focus our analysis on four social policy cases in Denmark during this period: two issues in the late 19th century and two in the 1920s and 1930s. The cases are chosen to represent important milestones in the development of Danish social policy. Moreover, each of these in its own way could be suspected of utilitarianism and as a potential heralder of SI logic. Our first case is the country's first tax-financed universalist old age pension reform from 1891. Here, we are particularly interested in the introduction of economic theory in debates around the reform: Is economization in itself a slippery slope towards utilitarianism? Our second case is a broader debate on the moral aspects of social policy, specifically concerning the potential of Christian discipline to bolster the spiritual character of the population and to prevent social degradation. It raises the question of how a concern with discipline can be interwoven with spiritual concerns. Our prism for the first two cases is the writings of economics professor Harald Westergaard (1853–1936). Westergaard is particularly interesting since he introduced new economic-statistical methods to a Danish audience and was centrally placed in the discussions and economic investigations leading up to the old age pension reform of 1891. Moreover, he was an active Christian socialist associated with the Copenhagen revivalist milieu (Andersen, 2012). He thus potentially incarnates two utilitarian logics in social policy: Economism and Christian discipline.

The third and fourth cases are the social reform of 1933 and the eugenic program of the 1930s. Both could be suspected of carrying a ‘high modern’ utilitarian statist ethos (Scott, 1998) in which concern for the individual was subjected to state reason. As a prism for these two cases, we use Karl Kristian Steincke (1880–1963) who is widely acclaimed as the ‘father’ of the Danish welfare state, being the sole author of the draft for the 1933 social reform. He was an experienced poor relief inspector and renowned juridical expert on social legislation, as well as a minister in consecutive governments led by the Social Democratic Party from 1924 onwards.

Using two individuals as prisms for the four cases allows us to show – in a way permitted by the constraints of the article format – how potentially utilitarian logics are (or are not) interwoven with other concerns. The method is thus not biographical in the sense that we seek to reconstruct the two authors’ narratives or experiences (Bornat, 2008). The two authors do not straightforwardly represent a specific societal position, but they do inhabit nodal positions in the debates as politically active intellectuals and members of the Danish moral elite (Khan, 2012; Sevelsted, 2023) involved in social policy during the formation of the early welfare state avant la lettre. We seek to exploit their wide-ranging professional and political experience combined with their strong engagement in public debates, not least their addressing an impressive variety of ideas, concerns, and arguments that they encountered through their public and political engagements. It is in this sense that we take their writings as prisms for contemporary ideational debates, concerns, and problems relating to social aid (see also Mudge, 2018).

We have focused on texts pertinent to the four cases. For the first case (1891 old age pension reform), we focus on Westergaard's statistical research and the debates in the National Economic Journal concerning the reform. For the second case (Christian discipline), we focus on his religious writings, including his confessional text and his exchange of letters with other revivalist intellectuals associated with the Church Foundation. For the third case (the 1933 social reform), we focus on Steincke's extensive writings on the need for such a reform, his preparatory works, and his deeper political and philosophical reflections on the moral, political, and economic foundations of social policy. For the fourth case (the 1930s eugenics program), we focus on his writings on questions of ‘degeneration’ which became an integral part of the Danish eugenic program.

Our reading strategy aimed at identifying problematics and concerns as well as their interrelations and motivations. We take inspiration from the problem analysis to show the way problems are represented (Bacchi, 2017) in ways that need not add up to an internally consistent system. Again, instead of assuming the existence of a paradigm organizing the whole of an oeuvre there to be revealed, we have looked for the interlinkages between problem articulations, motives, and concerns in the texts as potentially open-ended and even contradictory (Krarup, 2021).

Economic logics behind the universalist old age pension

Westergaard's work serves as a prism for the social question – the proletarianization of the working classes as the result of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization – that was increasingly recognized by conservatives and progressives alike in the late 19th century. How to understand the problem and its solution, however, separated the ideological waters: Conservatives viewed it as a moral problem to be addressed by philanthropic measures while the state should only step in as a last resort to discipline and deter the poor. Conversely, progressives envisioned the state to have an active role in securing entitlements for the working poor (Sevelsted, 2020).

The 1891 Danish old-age pension reform introduced for the first time what has later become a hallmark of Nordic welfare states: Universal and tax-financed social benefits. The reform marked a turn away from the poor house system and towards universal rights. The eligibility age was set at 62 and came with the qualification that the recipient had to have been self-reliant for the past ten years before retirement (Petersen, 2010).

While the reform was the immediate result of a political compromise between rural and urban interests (Baldwin, 1999), a new generation of economists informed by new economic principles and methods set the discursive framework for the political actors through scientific arguments (Andersen, 2010). Central to this generation, Westergaard was among the first economists to embrace marginalist principles and introduce them to a Danish audience (Westergaard, 1891), and seeing that present-day neo-classical economics is in part an heir to marginalism, we might suspect that Westergaard would emphasize the need for incentives to work in discussions of the 1891 reform.

Westergaard's embrace of marginalism, however, marked a dissatisfaction with previous economic methods that were both viewed as abstract and inaccurate. Statistical methods akin to Malthusianism had assumed that mortality rates, poverty, crime, and similar social phenomena were ultimately normally distributed in the same way as height and other biological phenomena – leaving any social policy intervention redundant. Westergaard now showed that regularities in society were different from the laws that govern causal relationships in nature. However, to study these regularities, ‘one needs to split the material’ (Westergaard, 1884: 19).

Westergaard and his colleague Marcus Rubin now calculated the rural population's mortality rates and variations in marriage and divorce rates across social strata (Rubin and Westergaard, 1886, 1890). These studies became a central part of the social liberals’ argumentation for the universalist old-age pension put forward in 1890 (Rubin, 1891).

Not unlike the recent discussions of SI, the economists’ studies showed that the current social system did not provide the deterrence and discipline that conservative politicians and economists intended, since as much as half of the propertyless rural working population in the countryside ended up in the poor house anyway (Rubin and Westergaard, 1886: 102). Moreover, this system did not provide adequate social assistance for the working classes, and forced insurance and savings schemes would primarily benefit those groups who had economic means and would live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their pension contributions, i.e., the middle classes (Rubin, 1891: 4). Westergaard further argued that the large sums that were spent on poor relief and forced labour institutions would be better spent on higher wages so that labourers had no need for poor relief in the first place (Westergaard, 1881).

The results challenged the existing social system's basic principle of help-to-self-help. The older generation of economists recognized the results of the statistical methods and was forced to oppose the reform with vague references to its ‘Socialist Foundation’ and ‘The tension in society’, which must not be relaxed, because then ‘Frugality would be reduced and the Energy of Work weakened’ (Falbe-Hansen, 1891: 62).

It is difficult to view the economization of social policy in Denmark as the introduction of a productivity frame. Rather than a concern for the future, it was motivated by a concern for the present. Westergaard's pioneering statistical works were used to undergird a concern with the proletarianization of the working class and change the discourse from one about morality to one of structures. Social rights and economization went hand in hand. We suggest that in this case, statistical and economic methods served as weapons in a battle of ideas at least as much as they constituted performative calculative devices. Today, statistical methods are more advanced and pervasive than in Westergaard's time, and the battle may not stand between statistics or not but between the kind of statistics that is used, for example, in relation to concerns about integrating GDP and other measures of citizens’ wellbeing.

Christian discipline: Church-led utilitarianism?

Christian groups in the late 19th century were concerned with using religion to promote discipline and frugality among the working classes – a concern akin to the disciplinary measures of the present-day ‘active state’. In Copenhagen, a voluntary social program was developed in relation to the Copenhagen Home (or Inner) Mission (est. 1865) (Sevelsted, 2018) – a revivalist milieu in which Westergaard took part. Could this entail that he was part of a utilitarian exploitation of faith that sought to subsume the needs of the individual worker under the greater good of the (Christian) nation?

A passage from Westergaard's confessional pamphlet (in which he declared and explained his Christian beliefs) can indeed be interpreted in this way: ‘Even national economists who are far removed from Christianity wish for a return of the times when belief in God was alive in the population and along with it resistance to disease and suffering (…)’ (Westergaard, 1885: 15). Just as Methodists and Pentecostalists believed in the power of faith to cure disease in the individual, Westergaard thus indicated a belief in the healing powers of faith at the level of the population. In this phrasing, the passage reads like a utilitarian exploitation of individual faith to bolster the economy.

However, if this passage could be read as an argument in favour of state-led social engineering and ideological indoctrination, one is quickly disabused of such notions when investigating in greater detail the kind of Christian social engagement that Westergaard represented. Like many of his contemporary urban revivalists (such as the leader of the Copenhagen Home Mission 1879–1886, Harald Stein), he thought the national church had fallen prey to habitual Christianity. Instead, he envisioned a revived Christian faith to come about through a decentralized synodical church structure organized around the living congregation in which strict church discipline would be enforced. He prayed for the emergence and aid of ‘50 men who would not consider Christianity and Socialism incompatible, […] and who would provide workers with practical evidence that there are hearts that beat for them precisely because they are penetrated by faith in the son of the living God’ (Westergaard, 1955: 75 [1889]). The resilience of the population should thus emerge as the result of workers’ own organizing efforts, aided by true believers.

Inspired by English Christian Socialism, Westergaard firmly supported trade unions that he viewed as a continuation of the guild system. He admired the English unions that were constructed as mutual-benefit associations and regretted that the Danish unions had a ‘German’ (i.e., political, revolutionary, and atheist) character. Still, he argued that the mutual-benefit association was crucial in addressing old age pension, disability, funeral costs, etc. Such associations taught workers the virtue of saving for the future and could make saving easily accessible through savings stamps and other innovations (Westergaard, 1881).

Westergaard thus embodied the Christian social movement of the time that emphasized individual discipline supported by strong communities. This movement, however, was also pragmatic and mobilized on initiatives aimed at community building as well as the legislature (Sevelsted, 2020). The Association for the Promotion of the Proper Use of Sundays (founded and led by Westergaard) lobbied for regulation protecting workers’ right to not work Sundays – a practice that was already widespread in revivalist milieus (Westergaard, 1889). The alcohol temperance cause spearheaded by religious organizations such as the Society for the Promotion of Sobriety and the Blue Cross (Westergaard was active in both organizations) advocated for both state and municipal regulation of alcohol production, consumption, and trade. Once again, Westergaard's scientific and religious practices dovetailed as he used his statistical competencies to provide statistical material and policy recommendations to reduce alcohol consumption in Denmark (Westergaard, 1910, 1917, 1918).

While Westergaard and his like-minded revivalist peers were concerned with discipline as a problem that religious self-organizing should address, these efforts did thus not amount to the kind of economization of religion that the passage above indicated. Rather, Westergaard represents a kind of social conservatism that is only alive in present-day Denmark and the Nordics in small revivalist communities in which social engagement is part and parcel of a living faith.

In conclusion, while Westergaard may be said to have economized social policy, this was part of his search for an empirically sensitive and logically consistent economic approach. Paradoxically, Westergaard was seemingly more utilitarian in his religious writings than in his economic ones. However, this was about the utility for individuals and social groups rather than the utility of the economy. Westergaard was highly involved in addressing the social question through future-oriented solutions such as insurance schemes, savings banks, and religious self-discipline but hardly merely for the sake of the resilience of the population. Means and ends were wholly intertwined in Westergaard's thinking. His concern for faith and well-being were mutually re-enforcing: Faith was beneficial for health and the economy; just as social security was a condition for faith. Whether one agrees with Westergaard's vision or not, it is a reminder to consider the ends to which disciplinary measures are a means.

Social reform – moral objectives

As the author of the 1933 Social Reform, Steincke sought to replace the existing ad hoc patchwork of public poor relief programs and uncoordinated private philanthropic activities with coherent legislation. He famously emphasized the principle of clearly defined rights, as opposed to the old ‘altruistic’ principle of assessing the ‘worthiness’ of each individual (KK Steincke, 1912a). However, in recent years, historians have challenged the established image of Steincke, addressing the limits to his alleged universalism rooted in concerns for social order (Kærgård, 2004) and not least his advocacy for eugenics as part of social policy (Koch, 2014). Both of these reassessments raise the question of possible utilitarian rationalities – not least given the long-standing focus on de-risking and up-skilling as core societal concerns in Danish political culture (Martin and Chevalier, 2022).

In Steincke's view, social policy was a way to remedy the material and economic injustice and the human suffering caused by capitalist society. However, the socialist goal of overturning capitalism through the socialization of the means of production was not to free citizens from the duty to work. Quite on the contrary, dismantling rent from the ownership of capital and land would make labour the only source of wealth. One historian describes Steincke as, ‘in truth, no dove in social policy; he wanted people to provide for themselves as far as possible’ (Christiansen, 2014: 3). While social reform should be based on a principle of the ‘social minimum’ for those in need (KK Steincke, 1920), Steincke also emphasized its role in a broader pursuit of higher goals of human dignity and prosperity. Already in 1910, Steincke deplored that the socialist labour movement tended to ‘disregard the moral formation’ of the individual (KK Steincke, 1910: 12). Without successful efforts to foster a nation of morally and spiritually cultivated individuals, Steincke (1912b) asserts, socialist society itself would simply slip into despotism. He scorns not only the ‘materialists’ in his own party, but also the official party newspaper, Social-Demokraten, for being too polemical and one-sided vis-a-vis political opponents. Steincke uses the term ‘liberality’ (frisind) to designate a kind of politically engaged tolerance – as opposed to the kind of laissez-faire tolerance of classical liberalism – and describes the long and difficult moral formation necessary for each individual to acquire this ultimately moral and spiritual capacity (KK Steincke, 1912b; see also Cornell, 1982).

Such moral formation certainly requires material conditions that allow time and resources to be spent on spiritual matters – but it also requires a kind of self-respect and moral conscience that are being compromised not only by capitalist society but also by the legacy institutions of poor relief and charity, according to Steincke. For example, before the Social Reform, public poor relief came with a number of severe civic consequences, such as a five-year deprivation of the right to vote, to marry, and to receive elder relief. But, Steincke asserts, even disregarding such legal effects, ‘the most demoralizing’ aspect of charity and altruism is ‘that access is granted to a relief of which the size and service has no limit from the point of view of the person in need’ (KK Steincke, 1946: 57, italics in original). Charity turns the person in need into a beggar, who does not take responsibility for organizing his or her affairs in accordance with known conditions (i.e., the guaranteed social minimum), but instead strives for more benefits from elastic and unorganized sources by simulating ‘worthiness’.

In apparent contrast to the principle of universal rights, Steincke emphasizes that the poor relief inspector is not an anonymous bureaucrat. Rather, ‘he must know the conditions and ways of thinking of the poor population; he must seek to win their trust and confidence, and he must strive not only to understand the views of the other but also to make that other understand the civil servant's decision, even if it goes against him’ (KK Steincke, 1945: 256; a similar view is expressed in K. Steincke, 1917). These views have been labelled ‘paternalistic’ (Kærgård, 2004), but it is important to appreciate the driving spiritual motive echoing Steincke's broader vision of liberality as the difficult cultivation away from judgementalism and towards engaged open-mindedness (‘liberality’) and understanding:

In a superficial or short-sighted perspective, the misfortune of many of these [poor] people may have appeared self-inflicted and one might be tempted to judge. However, the more one understood the conditions, the more the desire to moralize disappeared, and the more one felt like ‘the social doctor’ whose job it was to ‘cure the patient’ (KK Steincke, 1945: 260).

There is clearly a future-orientedness in this statement that is not entirely alien to the rationality of the SI logic. Social benefits are not simply granted on a universalist principle but inscribed in broader societal concerns where the poor need more than material rights. The quote thus illustrates how SI (a word Steincke himself does not use) would always be entangled in other concerns spanning culture, human development, and spirituality.

Humanism and eugenics

At first glance, eugenics and SI could seem like utilitarian ‘cousins’: Both subsume the immediate happiness of the individual to the long-term well-being of the population. At a second glance, however, when one considers the role of eugenics in the outlook of its ‘founding fathers’, the depiction of eugenics as pure utilitarianism becomes blurred.

Steincke's advocacy for eugenics comes out of concern for the fiscal sustainability of generous social policy. However, he did not base this on formalized investment functions. Rather, he seems to have held a lenient attitude towards budgetary constraints. For example, anticipating liberal and conservative critiques of his ideas for social reform, he described the debate about financing as ‘utterly useless’ because it will ‘always remain a matter of judgment whether social costs are too large or too small – the critical question being whether the money is well spent or not (KK Steincke, 1912a, pp. 30–31). Nevertheless, he expressed growing concern with the long-term budgetary prospects with increasingly generous social policies combined with increasing prosperity and, not least, continued advancements in medical science and healthcare. Potentially, in the long run, these factors would uphold the lives of many of those who previously perished under starvation and disease. In a competitive labour market, this growing group would drag down wages to the detriment of workers in general, but this vaguely defined group – including criminals, alcoholics, vagabonds, the mentally ill, the cognitively disabled, etc. – would also compromise spiritual progress and contribute to the moral ‘degeneration’ of the population (KK Steincke, 1912a, pp. 24–27, 1934: 94–95).

Steincke therefore weaved a eugenic program for sterilization into his social reform (Koch, 2014; KK Steincke, 1920, 1934). Based on laws passed in this period, almost 13.000 persons were sterilized between 1929 and 1967, many on various grounds concerning the spiritual, moral, intellectual, and social character of the individuals (Koch, 2001). However, despite Steincke's moral conservatism – including its sexist and racist manifestations – it is analytically important to appreciate the specific concerns motivating the Danish program. Already in his 1934 case for increased use of sterilization – including forced sterilization – Steincke addressed the worry that this would become a slippery slope towards brutality. Accepting this concern as legitimate, he stressed among other things the difference between the fostering of a racial ‘ideal’ and intervening to hinder degeneration and, ultimately, human suffering.

Every human being has the right to the happiest possible life and must, if necessary, be protected and helped and cared for; but in one respect an ordered society must be on guard, that is, when it comes to reproduction. If he or she is tainted in such a way that reproduction according to available knowledge would only produce misfortune for the offspring, then he certainly must receive as much relief and improvement of his own life as possible, but he must be deprived of the option to reproduce his defects. Under such an arrangement – implemented with caution, care, the gentlest means – there can be no objection to as humane a legislation as possible (KK Steincke, 1934: 97).

Pace Steincke, it would not be difficult for us today to formulate objections to his eugenic program, starting with the right over one's own body and its sexist and racist consequences. This would lead to a discussion of Steincke as a case of what Robert Miles (1993) called racialization not just based on skin colour or ethnicity, but also on economic and cultural traits. But our focus here is different, trying to understand the utilitarian weaving of economic and moral concerns at play. Steincke considers how the ‘feeble-minded’ (‘Aandssvage’ in Steincke's words) (KK Steincke, 1934: 105) in his experience were generally incapable of providing a humane upbringing and life for their children, often born outside marriage and without the protection of stable social networks. Not only would the growing number of such children claim growing expenses for asylums, but they would also ‘by the end of their schooling be thrown into unemployment and all kinds of moral debasement’ (KK Steincke, 1934: 105). In Steincke's own perception, eugenics – properly used – thus became an instrument to avoid human suffering. Without this instrument, society would have to resort to institutionalization of the ‘promiscuous’ women to keep them from further reproduction, whereas with a program for sterilization – voluntary or forced – the same women could live a life of freedom, marry, work, and have a home.

Steincke's sterilization laws were passed by parliament with almost unanimous support from conservatives, liberals, socialists, and social liberals alike. Similarly, public opinion was generally favourable – including, for example, notable feminist voices concerned with the human and social tragedies resulting from uncontrolled reproduction (Koch, 2014). It is difficult today to analytically re-open a chapter that has been so definitively closed. As is well-known today, the sterilization program had strongly discriminatory effects against women, criminals, the poor, the mentally ill, and the vaguely defined group of cognitively disabled people (‘feeble-minded’ in Steincke's words). Moreover, it lacked what we would today require of legal checks and balances (such as the right to appeal), it was based on questionable research and relied on vague criteria (with the mere observation of an increased risk of ‘abnormal offspring’ as decisive in some cases of sterilization) (H. Andersen, 2015). The recent exposé of the forced use of IUDs on thousands of Inuit women in Greenland during the 1960s and 1970s also reveals a colonial and racist heritage of the sterilization program.

On this basis, we see very clearly today how eugenics policy represents a politically misguided, scientifically unfounded, and morally unacceptable kind of utilitarianism that compromises individual rights in view of phantasmagorical long-term benefits (economic and spiritual) to society as a whole. However, for our purposes here, it is important not to neglect the socialist, humanist, and spiritual motives behind the laws. Theoretically, we today distinguish more sharply between biological and social heritage than did Steincke and his contemporaries. Technically, contemporary Danish society disposes of means of contraception, foetal diagnostics, and the right to abortion, and has established elaborate programs not only for professional assistance and counselling for parents with intellectual disabilities but also for the forced removal of children from their parents – including forced adoption at birth in severe cases. While these contemporary measures are far better aligned with human rights, legal certainty, and humanistic treatment of minorities, the concerns that motivate them are not as removed from those found in Steincke and others – who did not dispose of the same measures – as is often assumed (Koch, 2014).

In a certain way, Steincke's eugenic program is perhaps one of our four cases that shares the most with the present SI logic, despite their obvious differences (sterilization versus upskilling). At least this is so with regards to safeguarding and cultivating productive citizens (Hemerijck, 2015), although eugenics was not so much an expenditure held in the anticipation of future revenue, but it was a ‘cost’ (emotional, moral, social, and other; mostly carried by the sterilized individual) considered in light of the associated benefits (economic, but also social and moral – and even individual). Even the critiques of eugenics bear some resemblance to those of the contemporary SI logic regarding the fear of a utilitarian slippery slope away from individual rights and moral considerations in social policy. On the other hand, neither the former nor the latter can be fully understood in isolation from precisely those interweaving concerns and even critiques. What the comparison shows, then, is not just that the SI paradigm has a history, but also that in engaging with that history it becomes difficult to disentangle SI logics from their entanglements with cultural, moral, religious and other concerns – as well as from the broader historical context.

Conclusion

Proponents, as well as critics of SI policies, have heralded the introduction of SI as constituting a break with past and present ways of thinking about and doing social policy. SI supposedly supplants both a Keynesian view of social policy as bolstering against economic conjunctures and a neoliberal view of social policy as a means to increase the supply of labour. Instead, SI proposes ‘allocations to social programmes that produce returns and promote future social well-being … [of] individuals, households and communities, [where] these returns benefit society as a whole’ (Midgley, 2017: 14). For its proponents, this orientation towards future benefits creates an economic argument for generous social expenditure while for its critics, it signals a sneaking utilitarianism that prioritizes future benefits to the greater good over the individual.

To be sure, the political, economic, and social context of social policy has changed dramatically over the past c. 140 years. The specific technologies and modes of SI policy have changed as well, but, all caveats aside, as a social policy program that argues for prioritizing present expenses in light of future benefits for the greater good, SI is hardly new.

Around the birth of the modern Danish welfare state (avant la lettre) in the 1930s, central members of the moral elite around social policy like the social democratic minister Steincke identified a critical concern at the intersection of socialist and Malthusian principles: generous social policies will not only help those in need who will be able to return the benefit to society both in economic and moral terms – they would also sustain the lives of the many who would otherwise perish before reproducing, disseminating ‘degeneration’ in the population and ultimately leading to unsustainable costs. While Steincke's solution (eugenics) has been resolutely abandoned, his future-oriented concern with aligning individual and social returns on social spending resembles arguments made in favour of SI today. For example, social democratic ministers have argued that accounting for the dynamic returns of SI reveals the otherwise hidden costs of socially reproduced problems like crime, poverty, and break-up families (Halsboe-Jørgensen and Rosenkrantz-Theil, 2018).

Importantly, the key question may not be whether SI is new or not but in what sense it is new. Our historical study sheds light on the importance of not focusing solely on the principles and solutions of the SI logic but also on the motivating concerns and problems. Indeed, the concern for future returns – or lack of returns – on social spending is never a purely econometric question. Instead, it addresses problems at the intersection of short term and long term, between individual and social benefits, and between economic and other registers of benefits (moral, social, cultural, religious, or other). This shift in focus in no way makes critiques of SI as, potentially, a slippery slope to economic cynicism obsolete, but it does open for the co-existence of heterogeneous and even opposite concerns and principles.

If we go back even further, to Westergaard's time, it is less clear that even the broad definition of SI is found there. What we do find is another kind of utilitarianism, no less future-oriented, but not to be confused with the SI logic. Westergaard was particularly utilitarian in his religious and disciplinary writings, but not from the perspective of the state economy. The distinguishing feature of Westergaard resides in his social, economic, and moral concerns and the problems he sought to address at the intersections of those concerns, more so than in the economism and utilitarianism of his proposed solutions.

In sum, only if we maintain a very narrow and indeed almost technical definition of SI can we say it is entirely new. But once we broaden the definition, we find more than precursors and historical traces – we also begin to open up the very question of what defines ‘logics’ (or paradigms, discourses, approaches) in social policy. Our historical study has emphasized the importance of interlacing concerns and problems over the more usual suspect of what we may call solution templates. This shift in perspective, we believe, is valuable not only for historical inquiry but also for future studies of contemporary SI. For example, the critique – mostly coming from the political left – of the Danish state administration's macroeconomic models (called DREAM, ADAM, and MAKRO) for not including so-called ‘dynamic effects’ of public spending in areas such as childcare and education (Dragsted et al., 2017; Halsboe-Jørgensen and Rosenkrantz-Theil, 2018), appears to mobilize SI logic – almost paradoxically – to widen the room for other logics and for social and moral concerns. Such ambiguity and dynamic call for closer scrutiny of the way social investments are interpreted and implemented at different levels from academia over politicians and public officials to practitioners engaging with target groups – and how social problems at all levels are reflected and intersect with other concerns and motivations.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by ERC Starting Grant: 101114850 MORALITES.

ORCID iDs

Anders Sevelsted

Troels Krarup

Author Biographies

Anders Sevelsted, Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School, is a historical sociologist working in the intersection between elite studies, welfare state research, and civil society studies. He is currently the PI of the ERC project MORALITES which investigates how moral elites historically have shaped norms and policies in four European countries: Poland, Italy, England, and Denmark.

Troels Krarup is specialized in discourse analysis and in political and economic sociology. His previous works include contributions to discourse analysis methodology, the religious roots of German ordoliberalism, European financial market integration, and AI regulation. He currently works on the European sustainable energy transition.

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