CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

The course aims to provide the ability to critically and consciously understand and interpret the historical events that led to the emergence and evolution of the welfare state and welfare policies in Italy and internationally. Through a comparative and long-term perspective, it aims to develop skills and knowledge related to the development of welfare, its potential, and how it can still be a strategic tool today for addressing social challenges, emerging needs, poverty, and economic and cultural stratification.

Based on the Dublin Descriptors, students should achieve the following outcomes at the end of the course:

1. Knowledge and understanding: ability to understand the historical evolution of welfare state models and welfare policies, connecting their emergence and development—as well as their successes and failures—to their historical contexts, and therefore to the political, economic, social, cultural, and ideological events underlying their conception and implementation;
2. Applied knowledge and understanding: the ability to use acquired skills to reconstruct the historical evolution of welfare and welfare policies, identify their strengths and weaknesses on a national and global scale, and grasp the potential of different welfare state models and their applicability to the current situation;
3. Making judgments: the ability to develop critical thinking on the origins and development of the welfare state, and on the various models of its implementation on an international scale;
4. Communication skills: the ability to participate in public debate on pressing current social issues and the challenges and potential of today's welfare state, critically reconstructing its evolution, events, and actors, and using the past as an "interpretative key" for the present;
5. Learning skills: the ability to continue learning independently (including through the identification of texts and sources); the ability to delve deeper into the history of the welfare state and welfare policies—in Italy and around the world—between the 19th and 21st centuries.

Recommended.

For the purposes of the midterm exam, students who have achieved at least 70% attendance at the end of the course are considered to be attending.

• Fulvio Conti, Gianni Silei, Breve storia dello Stato sociale, Carocci 2022 (III edizione), ISBN: 978882901511. 
• Michela Minesso (edited by), Welfare e minori. L'Italia nel contesto europeo del Novecento, FrancoAngeli 2011, ISBN: 9788856836264, pp. 9-19,147-184, 285-302.

The welfare state has shaped Western civil life. This book reconstructs its history from a comparative and long-term perspective: from poor relief in Elizabethan England to Bismarck's social laws; from the birth of the concept of social security in Roosevelt's America to the path taken by totalitarian states in those years, up to the impetuous development of the welfare state in the West in the second half of the twentieth century. In this third edition, the volume illustrates the paths the welfare state has taken to respond to the challenges of the great social, economic, and demographic changes currently underway. After surviving economic crises and ideological attacks, it has also proven crucial in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing to represent a bulwark of security for humanity.

For those attending class, there will be a midterm written exam on some of the topics covered in class.

The remainder of the syllabus will be presented during an oral exam, including the presentation of in-depth group work on selected sections of the syllabus, previously agreed upon with the instructor. The instructor will also provide reference materials and methodological support for the preparation.

Non-attending students will present the full syllabus during the final exam.

Grading will follow the following scheme:

Failed

Significant deficiencies and significant inaccuracies in knowledge and understanding of the topics covered.

Insufficient analytical and synthesis skills.

Frequent generalizations.

Inappropriate use of references.

18-20

Impairments in knowledge and understanding of the topics covered, which settle at a barely adequate level.

Analytical and synthesis skills not sufficiently refined.

Barely appropriate use of references.

21-23

Slightly more than adequate knowledge of the topics covered.

Coherent arguments, although not particularly original.

Appropriate use of references, at the standard level.

24-26

Good knowledge and understanding of the topics covered.

Good analytical and synthesis skills.

Coherent presentation of the topics.

Appropriate use of references, at the standard level.

27-29

More than good knowledge of the topics covered.

Remarkable analytical and synthesis skills.

Use of references beyond the standard, through in-depth study of the topics.

30-30L

Excellent knowledge and understanding of the topics covered.

Remarkable analytical and synthesis skills.

Use of references well beyond the standard, through significant in-depth study.

• The First Initiatives to Combat Pauperism
• The Problem of the Poor between the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions
• Social Reforms and the Workers' Question in the Early Nineteenth Century
• The Bismarckian Model
• Mutualism, Welfare Policies, and Labor Legislation
• Liberals and Socialists between the Belle Époque and the Great War
• Social Policies from the War to the 1929 Crisis
• The New Deal and the Concept of Social Security
• The Totalitarian Welfare State
• The Roots of Social-Democratic Welfare
• Beveridge's Turn: Toward the Welfare State
• The Construction of the Welfare State: Social Security and Assistance from 1945 to 1973
• Protection "from the Cradle to the Grave"
• In Search of Universalism
• Social Security Systems in Scandinavian Countries and the United Kingdom in the 1950s
• The Expansion of Social Security in the 1960s
• The National Health Service
• New Social Needs and the Broadening of Welfare's Boundaries: Work, Housing, Education
• The Acceleration of Reformist Drive in the 1960s The Sixties
• Social Policies Put to the Test in 1968/A Review
• From Welfare Optimism to Welfare Pessimism: The Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s
• The Emergence of the Pension Question
• National Health Services and the Problem of Sustainability
• The Failure of Keynesianism and the Welfare Crisis
• The Turning Point of 1989
• The Decline of the Fordist Model
• The Storm of COVID-19
• 21st-Century Welfare and the Challenges of the Global Risk Society