Business and the Welfare State in France and Germany

International audienceIn The Politics of Social Risk : Business and Welfare State Development (2003), Isabella Mares seeks to show that business interests played a major role in the design of social insurance in twentieth-century France and Germany. Although she avoids the false assumption of inherent class conflict, she errs in implying that because the business community promoted social policies in the past, it intended to promote (and should promote) welfare-state development as such, rather than to make the best of what business people may have regarded as a bad situation