An archbishop gave English the phrase 'welfare state' during the Second World War
Germans had spoken of a sozialstaat, or social state, since 1870, but that literal label never caught on in English. During the Second World War the Anglican Archbishop William Temple, whose book Christianity and Social Order appeared in 1942, popularised the phrase welfare state instead, and it stuck across the English-speaking world.
Welfare itself is a far older word in politics. Under enlightened absolutism a ruler held unlimited power but was supposed to use it only as far as the welfare of subjects required, and the authorities decided for themselves what that meant. Historians call the arrangement welfare absolutism. In modern German, curiously, Wohlfahrtsstaat often carries a pejorative sting and serves as a fighting word, whereas the English phrase sounds neutral.
Temple's usage has been linked to Benjamin Disraeli's 1845 novel Sybil, subtitled The Two Nations, meaning rich and poor, in which power is said to have a single duty: securing the social welfare of the people. Disraeli, later prime minister, then belonged to Young England, a circle of youthful Tories who faulted the Whigs over the industrial poor and hoped to rally privileged classes to recognise the dignity of labour.
Otto von Bismarck built the first welfare state in an industrial society during the 1880s, insuring German workers against workplace hazards. In an Imperial Message to the Reichstag on 17 November 1881 he described the programme as practical Christianity. Public pensions and social insurance spread from that decade across industrialising Western countries, and both world wars and the Great Depression are counted as major spurs to expansion.
Far earlier precedents exist. In the 3rd century BCE the Indian emperor Ashoka made dharma a matter of state policy, renouncing conquest by violence, banning the killing of many animals and founding treatment centres for people and beasts, along with wells, orchards and rest houses. Rome began regular grain distribution in 123 BC under a law proposed by Gaius Gracchus; recipients once numbered an estimated 320,000, and bread later replaced grain.
Source: Welfare state
