It has often been noted that a liberal revival that came to prominence as a critique of the paternalism of the welfare state ended up expanding state involvement in the welfare system. Neoliberal welfarism, critics note, enlists the state to coerce welfare recipients into the worst, lowest-paid jobs and subjects them to invasive supervision and income-management. Such 'neoliberal paternalism' is often understood as the product of a tactical alliance between free-market neoliberals and family-values social conservatives who found common cause in opposition to the 'ungovernability' of the social movements of the 1960s. But the social conservatism of a figure like Lawrence Mead, whose 'new paternalism' inspired US workfare policies, was prefigured decades earlier by European neoliberals. Mead's 1986 exhortation that the state must demand 'acceptance of the verdict of the market place' was central to neoliberal discussions of welfare from the 1930s.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 216