This is the most satisfying book on the growth and retrenchment of the welfare state that I have read. Others suffer from such a surfeit of pre-conceptions that they blind themselves to important facts, or drown in the disorganized flood of information that rich countries produce, or suffer from the "blind men and the elephant problem" of looking at just a few countries. Castles's book, by contrast, confronts sometimes intractable data page by page, always asking seriously what the implications are for social theory, and always taking seriously the comparative task of asking what are the macro-social and macro-political sources of the variation he finds.

Perhaps the key result is a strong vindication of the Durkheimian school's argument that macro-level social and political institutions mediate the course of social evolution: Castles finds a great deal of variation among countries at the same level of development and of the same general type of property arrangements. The case for technological determinism is strongly undermined, as is the case for materialist theories more broadly. More importantly, he presses the data hard to find what does account for the differences he finds and finds some strong effects of recently rather neglected social actors. For example, the secularisation of European populations has turned many researchers attention in other directions, but Castles's results suggest that we ignore such religious factors as having institutionalised the Catholic church at our peril in understanding why some countries remain so inimical to women's labour force participation, despite pro-employment attitudes of their citizens.

A wealth of data are presented to inspire other researchers, and are brought together via a sturdy set of regression equations. Some of these are subject to caveats about the difficulties of inferring individual-level causality from aggregate-level data, but they form a valuable starting point from which multi-level analyses can grow.

As ever with Castles, the writing is clear and the organisation satisfying. All together a book worth buying as you will find your self dipping into it again and again.