Bodily Metaphors and Welfare Regimes

Abstract

Discussions of welfare policy and social justice lend themselves to the use of bodily metaphors. There is a compelling ‘organic analogy’ (Turner, 1991: 9) that is often drawn between the human body as an organic system and a society which sustains itself through systematic welfare provision. Social policy has in the past been defined as the manifestation ‘of society’s will to survive as an organic whole’ (Titmuss, 1963: 39) or, with a slightly different emphasis, as ‘that which is centred on institutions that create integration and discourage alienation’ (Boulding, 1967: 7). The contemporary concern of European social policy with combating ‘social exclusion’ (e.g. Commission of the European Communities, 1993) represents in many ways a new Durkheimian preoccupation with functionalist notions of integration and solidarity (Levitas, 1996) which are implicitly predicated on notions of social wholeness and the body social.