Th is book has had an unnaturally long gestation. Let me say why. As a young academic in the 1970s with faintly Marxist sympathies and strongly contrarian dispositions, I fell into the study of welfare states and social policy. I began by asking questions like, ‘why do governments become “welfare states”?’ ‘How good are they at doing good?’ ‘What can be done to make them better at it?’ By the early 1980s I was beginning to fi ght free of the comfortable certainties seemingly conferred in being a kind of Marxist in the 1970s. At some point I read Hannah Arendt (1958, [1963] 1994) and her injunctions to pay attention to the way things actually are and ‘to think what we do’. I began to see that things are not always simple and that any attempt to understand both individual and collective human conduct faces major diffi culties. I wrote a moderately well-received history on the origins of Australia’s welfare state which tried to capture some of that complexity. Looking back I am sure I thought it possible to ‘get to the bottom of things’.