Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021;  295pp.)

How do we feel about the state? And in what context have these feelings - be they love or hate - been forged? In a new monograph, Shaul Bar-Haim argues that the distinctive conjuncture of the British welfare state, psychoanalysis, and ‘the maternal’ gave rise to new emotional regimes that continue to reverberate. As ever, Carolyn Steedman provides a rich starting point for this analysis. Recalling her reading of the Robbins Report (which called for a vast expansion of higher education in Britain and thus enabled Steedman, as a working-class student with a single mother, to achieve on an unprecedented scale), Steedman noted, ‘I love the state because it has loved me’ (p. 2).

Though Steedman may have offered uniquely eloquent testimony to the maternal capacities of the welfare state, Bar-Haim suggests that many others may have experienced the same. He offers a useful reminder that for Steedman, Tony Judt, and many other canonical theorists of the postwar era (plus millions of ordinary Britons), ‘the welfare state was neither a successful political project nor a failure: it was a largely unspoken context in which their childhoods occurred. The British welfare state was - for them - simply the world they knew and grew up in’ (p. 20). For Bar-Haim, the notion that a social democratic government needs to play not only a parental but a maternal role in its citizens' lives took shape in the 1930s and has been with us - in some form - ever since.

According to Bar-Haim, ‘the maternal’ entailed an imaginary and imagined set of emotions and qualities (love, tenderness, care, maturity) that Britons perceived to be missing from their private and public lives. Beginning in the 1930s and accelerating after World War II, the state became the alternative source of maternal care when real mothers could not provide it. In short, the welfare state gave what (and when) mothers could not, especially as maternalism broadened from the