Gøsta Esping-Andersen

Works

• 1990The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

  Compares eighteen rich democracies by how far social rights free people from the market and how social policy shapes stratification, and groups them into liberal, conservative and social-democratic regimes formed by different historical class coalitions.

• 2009The Incomplete Revolution: Adapting to Women’s New Roles

  Women’s rising education and employment have transformed families, but the revolution is incomplete: where policies and men lag behind, fertility falls and inequality between families grows; Esping-Andersen argues for welfare policies that support gender equality and early childhood.

Position

Esping-Andersen is on the map as a bridge figure from comparative welfare-state research. “The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism” (1990) argued that welfare states differ in kind, not only in how much they spend. Esping-Andersen, inspired by Karl Polanyi and recalling Marx’s analysis of labour power as a commodity, measured how far social rights allow people to maintain a livelihood independently of the market (“de-commodification”), and how far social policy reproduces or reduces social stratification. On this basis the book distinguished three regimes: a liberal one with modest, means-tested benefits (United States, Canada, Australia), a conservative one tied to occupational status and the traditional family (Germany, Austria, Italy) and a social-democratic one with universal benefits (Scandinavia), each shaped by historical coalitions of social classes. The typology became a standard framework of the field. Feminist scholars such as Jane Lewis and Ann Orloff objected that it neglected unpaid care work and women’s dependence on the family; Nancy Fraser cited the book in her model of gender equity after the family wage. Esping-Andersen took up these objections with the concept of “de-familialisation” (“Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies”, 1999), and “The Incomplete Revolution” (2009) examines how women’s rising education and employment change families, fertility and inequality.

Life & context

Gøsta Esping-Andersen was born in Næstved, Denmark, in 1947. Esping-Andersen studied at the University of Copenhagen and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which awarded a doctorate in sociology in 1978 for a dissertation on social class, social democracy and state policy. Teaching posts followed at Harvard University, at the European University Institute in Florence and at the University of Trento, and later at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, where Esping-Andersen is now professor emeritus. The first book-length studies dealt with the social democratic parties of Scandinavia (“Politics Against Markets”, 1985). Esping-Andersen was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and became a corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 2010; the University of Copenhagen awarded an honorary doctorate in 2012.

Further main works

• Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (1985)
• Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies (1999)
• Why We Need a New Welfare State (2002, with D. Gallie, A. Hemerijck and J. Myles)