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Working out large-scale processes through close attention to local-level analysis remained central to Louise Tilly's approach to social history. An ongoing commitment to agency and strategy undergirded her vision for a global history that made connections between large-scale processes across space, between human agency and structure, and between the past and present. Her vision remains an important influence in my coauthored comparative history of the welfare state in England, France, and the United States. This is illustrated by a discussion of unemployment policies in the three countries at one particular moment of crisis, the Great Depression, concentrating on the United States, where the Depression hit first and hit the hardest. Important differences in demography, the mobilization of ordinary citizens, the responsiveness of state structures to democratic pressure, and public attitudes about the legitimate role of government all affected the history of unemployment policy in each country.

Recalling her experience as an exchange teacher in Birmingham, England, in 1938-39, in the midst of the Great Depression, Oregon teacher Mary Kelly, wrote:When I witnessed the first ‘leaving’ day … in one of the Birmingham schools and learned that as soon as the majority of the English children were fourteen they were through with regular schooling forever, I almost shed tears.“Do you mean that those girls will never go to high school?” I asked.“Yes it is true.”“Will they have jobs or will they be idle?”“The Education Department will place most of them in positions in homes, shops or factories ….”There were no graduation exercises, no lovely new dresses, no parents or relatives invited. I thought of my high-school graduation, which possibly would never have been if education was not free, because the means were limited. Still another graduation after going through college on nothing a year permitted me to take up teaching … . To me, at that moment, there was nothing more precious than democracy and I mean theAmerican way.

In this article I argue against Ronald Dworkin's rejection of the labour auction in his ‘Equality of Resources’. I criticize Dworkin's claims that the talented would envy the untalented in such an auction, and that the talented in particular would be enslaved by it. I identify some ways in which the talent auction is underdescribed and I compare the results for the condition of the talented of different further descriptions of it. I conclude that Dworkin's deviation from the ‘envy test’ criterion results in an inequality between the talented and the untalented which cannot be justified in egalitarian terms.

With the "forward march of labor halted", and labor movements everywhere in retreat, T.H. Marshall's state-based emphasis on social welfare as "social right" has reminded those interested in reform that appeals to membership in a national community, the essence of citizenship, have served to rally groups to successful struggles for reform. Those aspects of Marshairs ideas, best summarized in his classic 1949 address, "Citizenship and Social Class", with the greatest resonance for modern social theorists revolve around the relationship between citizenship, rights and markets. For Marshall, "the universal status of citizenship" was a plane of equality such that "all who possess the status (of citizenship) are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed". 1 Rights were embodied in a common culture and enforced by state power. Marshall believed that, gradually, one particular kind of rights, "social rights", would come to limit the power of the market. While markets would continue to exist and to generate social- inequality, government redistribution would increasingly expand the plane of equality to include the most important aspects of material and cultural life. The distinctive feature of these social rights according to Marshall is that they were not exemptions, privileges or paternalistic solicitude for those excluded from what he labels the "national community", but social rights were benefits given to members of the community to encourage and facilitate their continued participation. 2 Important elements in Marshall's argument and the focus of this paper are Marshall's assertions that social rights: (1) resulted from universal suffrage; (2) developed as a consequence of a new sense of social solidarity kindled by the expansion of political rights; and (3) restricted markets. We agree that the possession of one particular type of political right, the suffrage, encouraged the widespread adoption of the political rhetoric

Of all state social provisions, education is among the most important. It also shows the greatest amount of variation among Western industrial nations. England and the United States, countries with many common intellectual and governmental traditions, with longstanding commitments to individualism and democratic forms of government, exhibit great disparity in education. Even today, the United States is by far the leader in the field of mass education while England occupies a position in the bottom ranks.