German professors told their American students that humans were social animals shaped by the very traditions and institutions that they created. True human life was not the private life embraced in the American worship of the home, but rather the public life and entertainments that evangelical Americans so distrusted. Social welfare was not the responsibility of the family, but rather of society as a whole. In the 1880s, even as Bismarck attacked socialists, he simultaneously adopted state social insurance schemes and protectionism.
