Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden was the winner of the 1974 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs. Lacking its own distinct methodological identity, social policy has grown up under the wing of a number of cognate disciplines, most notably sociology. This book is an attempt to shift the study of social policy away from a predominantly sociological perspective and into the realm of political science. The policies chosen for analysis are British and Swedish old-age pensions and unemployment insurance programmes, and the techniques and concepts used are derived from pressure-group theory, systems analysis, political theory and political history. Mr Heclo begins his study by identifying certain preconditions for public welfare policies in both countries, emphasizing particularly economic growth, population stability and humanitarian reaction against the tradition of poor relief. He then proceeds to a comparative analysis of inputs, processing, outputs and feedback in the growth of social policy over the past hundred years. Drawing on a wide range of mainly secondary sources, he examines the role of electorates, parties, interest groups, politicians and free-lance intellectuals and he concludes with an analysis of social policy as part of a 'process of social learning' - a process which he sees not merely as the product of power relationships but as 'a form of collective puzzlement on society's behalf. Many illuminating parallels are drawn between the British and Swedish systems. In both countries the electoral significance of social welfare is found to be slight. In both countries the civil service is singled out as the most powerful force in policy formation - if not in the actual initiation of policies at least in their drafting, scope and subsequent modification. In both countries there appears to have been a high level of ideological discontinuity, policies which were originally sponsored by the 'left' later re-emerging as policies of the 'right' and vice versa. In both countries purely negative influences, such as ignorance, inertia and failure to correct unintended consequences, are seen as significant 88 Reviews policy sources, and in both countries the inheritance of past policies appears to be the single most crucial factor in determining what is feasible at any given time. Nevertheless the author avoids a convergence position, and the contrasts which he draws are in many cases as instructive as his parallels. In Sweden centralized government long preceded social welfare, whereas in Britain social welfare has been the cause rather than the consequence of the growth of a centralized state. In Britain social policy was largely a response to industrialization whereas in Sweden it was a response to rural proletarianization. In Britain social insurance has helped to stifle a more rational use of the labour force, and one of the most significant facts in this book is that Sweden with a labour force one-sixth the size of Britain's has four times as many places for industrial retraining. In Britain social policies have been forced to accommodate a much larger and more powerful voluntary sector, but perhaps paradoxically governments in Sweden have been much more successful at integrating pluralistic organizations into the policy-making elite. This contrast is most striking and most politically important in relation to trade unions, which in Sweden have for many years played a dynamic role in the planning of social welfare whereas in Britain they have been much more exclusively concerned with wages and conditions of work. Similarly there seems to have been much more co-operation in Sweden between the different political parties. This has not precluded quite severe political conflict (for example over 'cost of living areas' in the 1930s and national superannuation in the 1950s); but battle has been joined not as a conditioned reflex of preconceived party loyalties but at the conclusion of intelligent and open public debate. In general social policy formation in Sweden comes across as an altogether better-informed, more professional and more sophisticated process than the parallel process in Britain - quite apart from the more adult level of political discussion Swedish policy-makers have nearly always been much more thorough in both research and consultation, through the use of investigatory commissions, academic and technical advisers and the 'remiss' (translated by Heclo as 'the circulation of a paper to interested parties for comment'). Certain criticisms may be made of Heclo's study at both an analytic and a technical level. He greatly exaggerates the social homogeneity of contemporary British society (although the lack of just such a homogeneity by comparison with Sweden must surely help to account for many of the perceived differences in polit