The historical and political debate has considered the relationship between war and social politics in terms of trade-off for a long time. War, especially if it is prolonged, tends to shift the social politics, mainly because of the new spending imperatives. However the most recent literature has adopted a more dissipated perspective widening the temporal and comparative horizon of the analysis. In this way some new jobs have shown as war is able in some cases to act like a real catalyst of the politics of welfare. Italy is no exception in this panorama. In this essay authors focus on the following periods 1915-1919 and 1943-1948. Their purpose is to illustrate the ambitious projects followings the wake of the War and to investigate the reasons which promoted in advance such elaborations, and then determined the political failure of it. Reconstructing these two critical steps in the development of the Italian welfare state, they also outline the most general frame of this development from its beginning in the Fifties, as well as they try to delineate a first comparative hypothesis with the German case.
Keywords: Welfare, warfare, war, social politics, welfare society.