566
IRVING
HOWE
active subjects demanding that the state serve their needs. The con–
trast with earlier societies is striking, for in them the dominant con–
viction was, as Michael Walzer writes, that
the state always
is
more than it
does.
Pre-welfare theorists described
it as a closely knit body, dense and opaque, whose members were
involved emotionally as well as materially, mysteriously as well as
rationally, in the fate of the whole. The members ought to be
involved, it was said, not for the sake of concrete benefits of any
sort, but simply, for the sake of communion. Since loyalty was a gift
for which there was to be no necessary return, it could not be pre–
dicated on anything so clear-cut as interest. It depended instead on
all sorts of ideological and ceremonial mystification. . . . The state
still does depend on ideology and mystery, but to a far less degree
than ever before. It has been the great triumph of liberal theorists
and politicians to undermine every sort of political divinity, to
shatter all the forms of ritual obfuscation, and to turn the mysteri–
ous oath into a rational contract. The state itself they have made
over ... into a machine, the instrument of its citizens (rather than
their mythical common life) devoted to what Bentham called
"welfare production." It is judged, as it ought to be, by the amounts
of welfare it produces and by the justice and efficiency of its dis–
tributive system.
What occurs characteristically during the growth of the welfare
state is a series of "invasions," by previously neglected or newly
cohered social groups demanding for themselves a more equitable
portion of the social product and appealing to the common ideology
of welfarism as the rationale for their demands. (Again an analogy
with Communism: the dominant ideology is exploited and violated by
the ruling elite, yet can be turned against its interests.)
In its early stages, the welfare state is "invaded" mostly by
interest groups - economic, racial, ethnic - which seek both im–
provements in their condition and recognition of their status. An
interest claim that is made through norms the entire society says it
accepts is harder to reject than one which sets up new norms not yet
enshrined in the society's formal value system - and that, in passing,
is one reason it is today easier to press for desirable domestic legisla–
tion than to affect foreign policy. In its later stages - which I believe
we are just beginning to approach in the United States - the wel–
fare state is subjected to a series of pressures that morally are both
more grandiose and more trivial than those of the usual interest
groups; since now it becomes possible for claims to be entered with,
