Rethinking the Formation of Welfare States: Malthusianism and Japan in the 20th Century
According to Karl Polanyi, the origin of welfare states in the West involved a rejection of Malthus's population theory. In England, the welfare state emerged through modifications to the "self-regulating market," which was coercively institutionalized by the New Poor Law. Recalling this legislation was justified by Malthus's Principle of Population, welfare states were born in a shift in thinking about the cause of poverty and responsibility for it: the transition from attributing poverty to overpopulation to market mechanisms, which necessitated institutional solutions.
On the other hand, the genealogical researches of welfare states based on Michel Foucault's theory of governmentality, conceptualize "population" as a central mechanism of them. Foucault posits that the modern state's object and aim is the governance of "population," which, in contrast to Malthusian views, is supposed to reach a "natural" equilibrium through laissez-faire. Such frameworks tend to regard welfare states as complements of the natural regulatory mechanisms of the "population".
However, these theoretical models cannot be applied to the Japanese context. In fact, the Malthusian devil continued to survive there and the formation of Japan's welfare state in the mid-20th century centered on the "overpopulation problem". The population was thought could have brought about catastrophic consequences if unmanaged.
This paper will explore methodologies for examining the influence of Malthusianism on the formation of the welfare state and assess the theoretical implications of this analysis for existing theories.