The welfare state finds itself in a phase of sustained upheaval. That is already common knowledge. But how to define this transformation, this crisis, is clouded in obscurity. The prevailing discourses around the dismantling, or the »neoliberal« rolling back of the welfare state fall short of the mark. As a counter to this, this book proposes to understand the transformation from the welfare state that provides (for people) to the activating and investing welfare state, as a fundamental shift of axes in the relation between the individual and society: as a reinvention of the social. It traces the contours of an »active society«, in which mobility, flexibility and productivity degenerate into political formulae guiding individual self-constraint. No longer is the wellbeing of the individual citizen in the foreground, but rather the welfare of the »societal community«. With this, no less than the fundamental promise of modernity is abandoned: the promise of leading a self-determined life.
