Beveridge in the longue durée

Beveridge and his Plan occupy a singular place in the pantheon of social policy. This is due partly to the wartime circumstances under which the Plan was published and partly to T.H. Marshall's world‐historical reading of the Beveridge‐inspired welfare reforms of the first majority Labour government. Equally, Beveridge's reputation rests on his ability to balance the liberalism and collectivism inherent in any social policy. But this balance also introduced fundamental ambiguities into his proposals. Most important was the contradiction between a right to benefits based, on the one hand, on the recipient's status as a contributor to social insurance and, on the other, sheerly on the facts of citizenship and need. Social rights are not, as one might believe from the Marshallian interpretation, a simple extension of civil and political rights. Finally, the increasing internationalization of the welfare state and the consequent broadening of its interpretation, which tends to marginalize the social citizenship model, will either diminish or significantly change the evaluation of Beveridge's place in history.