Pribram’s methodological article defines social policy as a theoretical discipline through the redistribution of responsibility. Responding to debates surrounding the 1924 Heidelberg sociology congress, he argues that disagreements over definitions reflect competing conceptions of society. Clarifying social policy therefore also clarifies the organization of the social sciences.
Es dürfte daher nicht vergeblich sein, dieser immerhin belangreichen Frage auch fernerhin einige Aufmerksamkeit zuzuwenden, zumal ihre Klärung nicht ohne Bedeutung für eine zureichende Gliederung der Sozialwissenschaften zu sein scheint.
English translation: It should therefore not be in vain to devote some further attention to this question, which is after all a weighty one, especially since its clarification does not seem to be without importance for an adequate classification of the social sciences.
The opening discussion distinguishes Catholic revelation, individualism, national or state-centred collectivism, and Marxism. Revelation supplies binding ideals; collectivist doctrines subordinate individuals to a national or political whole; Marxism derives practical demands from historical necessity. Such commitments give social policy predetermined purposes and encourage its treatment as a Kunstlehre, a practical doctrine concerned with appropriate means.
Die Aufgabe der Sozialpolitik ist allerdings für jede der erwähnten drei Weltanschauungen eine andere.
English translation: The task of social policy is, however, a different one for each of the three worldviews mentioned.
Individualist thought, by contrast, permits competing demands to become objects of inquiry without requiring the investigator to endorse their ultimate legitimacy. Pribram distinguishes evaluating whether measures achieve their stated purposes from judging whether those purposes are intrinsically justified.
Diese relativistische Problemstellung ist für das individualistische Denken überhaupt charakteristisch.
English translation: This relativistic formulation of the problem is characteristic of individualist thinking in general.
This position does not make existing definitions automatically neutral. References to society’s purposes may presuppose collective ends, while accounts of classes as acting subjects may confuse analytical categories with organizations capable of forming a common will. A theoretical discipline must expose such assumptions rather than incorporate them unnoticed.
Pribram places social policy within theoretical politics but denies it an exclusive substantive territory. Economic and population policy concern particular spheres of intervention; social policy identifies measures across different spheres through a shared purpose. Labour regulation, housing, education, and taxation can consequently receive both sectoral and social-policy analysis.
That shared purpose emerges historically from opposition to unrestricted individual responsibility. Social-policy movements challenged the expectation that workers should bear all consequences of their economic position, including circumstances beyond their control. Their distinctive aim is to reduce individuals’ burden of responsibility in those individuals’ interests. Responsibility must accordingly pass to employers, associations, insurance institutions, or public bodies. The qualification concerning individual interests excludes restrictions justified solely by overriding collective purposes.
The institutional analysis tests this criterion against charity, welfare provision, labour protection, and social insurance. Charity and patriarchal assistance accept an existing distribution of responsibility; social policy makes its alteration the issue. Provision remains formally incomplete when assistance is offered without precisely established obligations. Providing housing, for example, differs from assigning an enforceable responsibility to supply it.
A formally complete measure identifies whose individual responsibility is reduced, designates the corresponding bearer of responsibility, and specifies beneficiaries’ claims. Such completeness does not itself establish effectiveness. Labour protection transfers defined obligations to employers, whereas unions and works councils raise questions where institutional powers lack corresponding responsibilities. Social insurance combines compulsory reallocations of responsibility with risk pooling. Differences among employer liability, collective financing, shared contributions, and state provision thus involve judgments about responsibility, not merely administrative choices.
The concluding discussion proposes historical study of movements, comparative institutional analysis, and assessment of results against intended purposes. International social policy is revealing because common standards may arise from either cosmopolitan commitments or national calculations. Emerging principles of social justice remain objects of investigation rather than absolute criteria supplied by the researcher.
Pribram reconnects social policy with sociology through the forms in which individual and collective responsibility are constituted. The discipline’s unity lies less in a bounded subject matter than in a recurring analytical question: whose burdens are reduced, who assumes them, and through what obligations? His contribution is to make this allocation the organizing principle of social-policy theory while distinguishing the analysis of value-laden purposes from their endorsement.
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