Today, we associate the welfare state with the Left. But that connection has not always been so clear. The welfare state has been a site of intense political struggle between competing visions of political life, with conservatives’ paternalistic and liberals’ technocratic versions of the welfare state seeking to supplant the Left’s democratic ideals. Still, history suggests that even where welfare reforms are advanced to secure the status quo, the Left can exploit them to build working-class power and democratic movements.

The first modern, nationwide social welfare laws were passed under Otto von Bismarck, the autocratic chancellor of late-nineteenth-century Imperial Germany. Taking aim at what was then the largest, most powerful socialist party in the world, the German Social Democratic Party, Bismarck attempted to use the welfare measures (health insurance, accident insurance, disability insurance) to arrest the socialists’ growth and prevent the deepening of German democracy.

Bismarck’s turn toward the welfare state presented the socialists with a dilemma. They knew Bismarck’s welfare laws were intended to destroy them. Bismarck was convinced that most workers were committed monarchists, loyal to the existing order, and that if workers’ hardship was removed, the fires of socialism would abate.