Quote Originally Posted by kathaariancode View Post
To be clear, when I say "liberalism" I'm talking about the more common use of the word, not the American sense of the word, which usually refers to the politics of Social Democrats, Progressives and Marxists. But you're right, it doesn't seem that the left anywhere has taken the lesson of Weimar Germany completely to heart. That's partly because the Weimar republic exercised welfare to extremes, and because the system was an ad hoc combination of state run welfare working together with private religious and secular charities (mostly religious, though).

I'm reading David Crew's "Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler" right now actually. Great stuff, but it gets a little bit nitty gritty into the details and case studies like Hamburg. I think you gotta love policy to enjoy a book like that.
Didn't Bismarck bring many social reforms to Germany?