Book Review: The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State, by Steven Klein

• Published date: 01 December 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211011270
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 1067

The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State, by Steven Klein. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2020. 204 pp.

Reviewed by: James Muldoon, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, University of

Exeter, Penryn, UK

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211011270

Steven Klein’s The Work of Politics seeks to change the way we think about

the welfare state. We are accustomed to seeing welfare institutions such as

unemployment insurance, healthcare, and job guarantees through a protective

lens as instruments to safeguard human life. Rather than viewing them as

bureaucratic apparatuses forming docile and passive subjects, Klein theorizes

them as “mechanisms for collective democratic empowerment and participa-

tion” (2). Based on an idea of the welfare state as a contested political terrain,

he argues that it is the role of social democratic movements to transform

structures and practices of social domination. The book aspires to rejuvenate

the social democratic project around the ideals of citizen empowerment and

participation. It succeeds in reorienting political theory around a new set of

important concerns about welfare institutions.

The Work of Politics offers a historical reconstruction of political thought

and practices that seeks to provide useful resources for further democratizing

our welfare system. Through reflections on three main theorists—Max

Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas—and historical sections on the

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Swedish feminist move-

ment, the book shows how welfare institutions can become sites of political

mobilization and objects of political judgment and critique.

The starting point of the book’s intervention into political theory is the

diagnosis of a wrong turn made by Max Weber, leading to an unfortunate

legacy inherited by democratic theorists who conceive of welfare institutions

as routine, technical, and completely absent of democracy and politics (22).

This characterization of welfare institutions, for Klein, leads democratic the-

orists on a quest toward experiences that seem to escape this realm of neces-

sity. Rather than turning to extraordinary moments outside of the social

reproduction of everyday life, the book asks whether the seemingly ordinary

and mundane has been for too long overlooked as a meaningful field of politi-

cal action.

The central political argument of The Work of Politics has both a prag-

matic and utopian dimension to it. On the one hand, it points to the impor-

tance of political struggles over core social policies that have a profound

effect on many people’s lives. On the other hand, it calls on us to rethink and