Th is book has had an unnaturally long gestation. Let me say why. As
a young academic in the 1970s with faintly Marxist sympathies and
strongly contrarian dispositions, I fell into the study of welfare states
and social policy. I began by asking questions like, ‘why do governments
become “welfare states”?’ ‘How good are they at doing good?’ ‘What can
be done to make them better at it?’ By the early 1980s I was beginning
to fi ght free of the comfortable certainties seemingly conferred in being
a kind of Marxist in the 1970s. At some point I read Hannah Arendt
(1958, [1963] 1994) and her injunctions to pay attention to the way
things actually are and ‘to think what we do’. I began to see that things
are not always simple and that any attempt to understand both individual
and collective human conduct faces major diffi culties. I wrote a
moderately well-received history on the origins of Australia’s welfare state
which tried to capture some of that complexity. Looking back I am sure
I thought it possible to ‘get to the bottom of things’.