Social State: Formation Factors

The article discusses the social and worldview background for the formation of the phenomenon of the social state in the Western European civilization of the 18th-19th centuries. Its formation was connected with reconsideration of idea of "the public benefit outside which there were a poverty and a social inequality. This tendency to ignore poverty and social inequality was maintained by faith in the omnipotence of a rationally organized state. The latter for two centuries solved the problem of poverty with measures of isolation, moral condemnation and disciplinary violence. Gradually together with destruction of former rationalism and a mechanistic picture of the world, development of national education systems there is a suspicion to "reasonably arrange" public system and the state crowning it. New idea of the state is developed. Now it includes in the sphere of the responsibility besides the political rights of the person and citizen his social rights. The leading role in this process in the second half of the 19th the first third of the 20th century belongs to the socialist thought which had considerable impact on domestic policy of many countries of Europe and USA. Therefore the first stage of formation of the social state can be characterized as socialist.