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Synopsis The job that social policy has taken on is that of making sense of and moving beyond the ideological conflicts that have surrounded the development of capitalist social policies. In tracing these conflicts, we encounter' a bewildering array of sometimes less than helpful labels describing different ideological variants (e.g. 'social liberalism' and 'neo-conservatism'). In the froth of parry politics, parries adapt and change so that the names by which they are known bear little relation to the current ideological fashions that they are seeking either to mould or to mimic. In the real world we encounter hybrid ideologies founded on compromises and contradictions. However, like it or not, it is through political and ideological discourse that the very language of capitalist social policy has been constructed.