FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL WELFARE

FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL WELFARE

•Social welfare, as an attempt to achieve social satisfaction and create a livable society

for citizens have had a long history and intractable antecedence

•This long history forms the foundation upon which the entire study of social welfare is based.

•    The following shall be examined as the foundational factors which ignited considerations of social welfare in contemporary society:

•    Education

•    Religion

•    Political Development

•    Civil Rights Movement

Education

•The works of classic scholars such as Plato (The Republic) remain notable in the

foundation of social welfare.

•Plato, in ‘The Republic’ stated that “justice is not the right of the stronger but the effective harmony of the whole. All moral conceptions revolve about the good of the whole-individual as well as social”.

Education

•Thomas Hobbes’, John Locke’s and JeanJack Rousseau’s positions about Social Contract gave a new hunch into political leadership, thereby informing the need for a coalition among citizens in their effort to build a just state system.

Education

•The founders and leaders of new Roman Empire believed education was fundamental to nation building and democratic consolidation. Thus, education we liberalized, no more as a royal business but an a public one.

Education

•Focus of states therefore was faced towards encouraging reading, writing and arithmetic because information in modern settings are communicated via these channels.

Education

•Socrates, Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Paine (The Rights of Man), gave a new construction to the dignity of man and respect for humanity

•Education created a new world view about social existence, thereby causing the annihilation of every act of subjugation against women, children, less privileged etc

•Education helped promote informed population

Religion

•Thomas Aquinas and August Comte were the foremost religious fundamentalists that championed the need for social rights and welfare for man from the religious perspective.

Religion

•These were reflected in their works and episcopal activities

•Aquinas himself was critically against the emergence of capitalist and socialist systems. He was a proponent of moral philosophy which gave priority to relations among men based on conscience.

Religion

•The early church’s movement (the Society of Jesus) as well as Catholicism criticized the regimes of the time which was highly arbitrary and exploitative, coupled with slavery and wars of conquest.

•Majority saw these acts as inhuman, thereby pulling together to resist systems that perpetrate such acts.

Religion

• Various religious movements unanimously believed that

•“the Society should treat all equally well, who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice towards all institutions and the efforts of all various citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge”

•John Stuart Mill

Political Development/ Democratization

• Development from a seeming monarchical system (such as could be found in Ancient Europe and most

African countries, even in Middle-Eastern countries), to a quasi-democratic (as can be found in African countries), to true democratic systems (as can be found in most developed nations), gave a boost to social welfare administration

Political Development/ Democratization

•Citizens in these nations see the

state system as a proper channel to which social welfare demands could be directed, thus they worked hard to develop them.

Political Development/ Democratization

•Also, following unwelcoming attitudes given to military and unjust regimes (as in Japan), because they were becoming unfashionable, it became necessary to readjust the state systems of nations such that an all-inclusive governance is occasioned

Political Development/ Democratization

•This raised the consideration and application of democratic principles such as rule of law,

periodic elections, equality of rights, freedoms and opportunities in modern states.

•As a consequence, agitators and social welfare activists were no more confined to a corner, neither were they frustrated, punished and martyred by state governments.

Political Development/ Democratization

• In the words of famous Sen, political development involves

•…the removal of major sources of unfreedom; poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systemic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states.

•- Amartya Sen (1999)

Civil Rights movements

•Democratic orientation and consciousness created a civil atmosphere in most cities thereby encouraging groups rights and pro-choice movements.

•This occasioned the formation of global organizations (such as the International Labour Organization) and domestic groups (such as

Nigerian Labour Congress)

Civil Rights movements

•These groups champion corporate social welfare demands of a group a people

•While some were (and are) anomic, others were (and are) liberal but with same aim of achieving social justice for their members and the society at large

Civil Rights movements

•Some of these groups were led by the likes of Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal), U Nu (Myanmar), Vinoba Bhave (India) and Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria, who launched the Zikist Movement)

Civil Rights movements

•Civil movements have equally developed a global consensus towards multiculturalism, deliberative democracy(a form of government whereby the leaders and citizens justify and select each process and policy taken in state administration).

Civil Rights movements

•In contemporary settings, citizens control the decision making processes and the decisions of the government with the aim of enforcing a people-driven system and development.