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Legal Reconstitution of the Welfare State: A Latent Social Democratic Legacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Abstract
A critical review of two recent discussions of problems in the law of the welfare state helps to explain the contemporary appeals of a theory of legal evolution originally developed by social democratic theorists in conjunction with the rise of collective labor law in settings as disparate as Germany and the United States. Influential contemporary formulations treat collective labor law as merely one example of a generalizable decentralization of regulative and constitutive law, taken as a distinguishing feature of a new evolutionary stage. But the question is raised whether the plausibility of this model does not tacitly depend on a positive reading of the labor experience, and consequently whether its present relevance is not seriously put into question by the deep crisis of the labor movement, whose social and political power was acknowledged by the original theorists to underlie the legal structures taken as paradigmatic.
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- Copyright © 1987 The Law and Society Association.
Footnotes
This article is based on a seminar that was first presented in Coesfeld, F.R.G., December 8–10, 1983, at the conference “Reform in Democracies,” organized by Rüdiger Voigt and sponsored by the Ministry for Science and Research of North Rhine-Westphalia, and then offered at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), February 23, 1984 in Wassenaar, the Netherlands. I am grateful to Jennifer Nedelsky, Theodore Lowi, and Volker Meja for suggestions concerning revisions. My ongoing research is indebted to support from NIAS; the Bard College Center, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Trent University Research Committee, Peterborough, Ontario; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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