Which Welfare State? Which Social Politics?

In this essay I will focus on three main issues which play a central role in the development of a certain idea of the welfare state today. My main goal is to focus attention on some essential concepts for building a credible proposal, within a philosophical-political perspective, useful to reworking a different approach for planning and management of social policies. The crisis of the welfare state, nowadays, is a systemic crisis. We have to fight against new enemies of democracy, and we must find effective solutions useful to defeat the new faces of poverty. This aspect has come to generate a heavy conflict of class, economic status and membership. In view of this clear difficulty of traditional models of welfare, comes forward the idea to experiment with new approaches based on the regenerative capacity of resources. Underlying this new strategy for the organization of welfare policies, there is an attempt to combine social equity and distributive justice with the strengthening of some conception of social responsibility and with the capacity of empowerment that should characterize social policies.