Abstract
Social and political theory underwrite the welfare state in their portrayal of the world and of possibility. Edward J. Martin’s recent attempt to understand welfare policy through the lens of postmodern theory is therefore an important one and an undertaking that I appreciate. However, it is specifically because social and political theory are so influential in the construction of welfare policy that it is equally important that critical social and political theory are able to stand apart from the sloganeering that inhibits critical thought. I find that Martin’s neglect of critical theories of the state and welfare, combined with his conflation of postmodernism, critical theory, and pragmatism, collapses the distance between critique and ideology. My aim in this brief essay is limited, but important: I simply want to destabilize Martin’s stabilization of the modern neoliberal welfare state as the end-point of theorizing about the future of well-being.
