Workers’ and Clients’ Mutualism Compared: Perspectives from the Past in the Development of the Welfare State

IN THE PAST TWO CENTURIES WESTERN STATES HAVE ACQUIRED many functions that before were carried out by small social entities, such as families, neighbourhoods, parishes, guilds or local communes. As these activities became the business of state agencies, they changed beyond recognition. Apprenticeship and tutoring made way for formal education in a universal and compulsory school system. Charity and mutual aid wellnigh disappeared as social security and public welfare emerged. Folk medicine, magic and home healing waned, while treatment of the sick became the monopoly of the medical profession, protected, regulated and, for the greater part, paid by public agencies.