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The article replies to professor David Levine's rhetoric and reality in American welfare history. The author largely agrees with Professor Levine's conclusion that the impact of the application of the principles of 1834 on contemporary welfare reform is "far more potent rhetorically than it is in fact" (733) and that "the slowly expanding mild welfare state is here to stay" (741). Levine argues that this is the result of the emergence and persistence of a "New Deal consensus" regarding the responsibility of government to secure macroeconomic stability and individual security that survives from its origin in the 1930s till today. The questions that arise are why this consensus emerged when it did and why it persists. In his paper the author attempts to explain why the reemergence of the rhetoric and practice of welfare reform had occurred, and he argues that an answer could be found in ideas developed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944). It had been argued that the logic of the self-regulating market required the denial of a right to life outside the market. This was affirmed in the passage of the New Poor Law and in the rhetoric and practices of current welfare reform. However, Polanyi's Great Transformation also provided us with an explanation of the factors which underlie the emergence of the New Deal consensus in the 1930s, the persistence of the welfare state, and the largely rhetorical impact of the principles of 1834 on current welfare reforms.