Person - Selbsthilfe - Genossenschaft - Sozialversicherung - Neo-Korporatismus - Staat

The German healthcare system is organised as an order of collective self-governance in the tradition of neo-corporatism. Part of this, modern mutualism, which is defined as free association, may be on the transformative pathway to erosion. This can be explained, for example, using the new developments in the health-related self-help movement between the logic of colonising neo-corporatism versus regional promotion of social capital in the context of local caring communities. ‘Free association versus the rule of the state and of public law bodies’? This archetypical tension in the history of law and culture dominates this study. It analyses transformations of reciprocal self-help phenomena from a morphological point of view, and this analysis is embedded in the analytical framework of an anthropologically sound sociology of elementary forms of social welfare production and their institutional derivations in historical and cultural comparison.