The comprehensive forms of social insurance that had been implemented in Germany under Otto von Bismarck as early as the 1880s, and in other European states throughout the following decades, were much slower to be accepted in the United States, where they had to overcome both elite and popular attachment to notions of personal and family responsibility. Throughout the early twentieth century, opponents of social welfare argued that the socialization of risk would destroy the family as a moral institution by displacing economic solidarity among kin. Even public assistance to noncontributing dependents such as widows and the aged was attacked as a threat to the values of family responsibility and self-support.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 219