ICU patients with significant illness severity experienced a decrease in the incidence of an important nosocomial infection that is commonly associated with increased use of ICU resources and length of stay. This decrease in patient morbidity led to substantial cost savings despite the small size of our study trial.

According to the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, modern societies have become increasingly preoccupied with the future and safety and have mobilized themselves in order to manage systematically what they have perceived as “risks” (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). This special section investigates how conceptions of risk evolved in Europe over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the creation and evolution of social policy. The language of risk has, in the past twenty years, become a matter of course in conversations about social policy (Kemshall 2002). We seek to trace how “risk” has served as a heuristic tool for understanding and treating “social problems.” A key aim of this collection is to explore the character of social policy (in the broadest sense) as an instrument (or technology) that both constructs its own objects as the consequences of “risks” and generates new “risks” in the process (Lupton 2004: 33). In this way, social policy typifies the paradox of security: by attempting literally to making one “carefree,” or sē (without) curitās (care), acts of (social) security spur new insecurities about what remains unprotected (Hamilton 2013: 3–5, 25–26). Against this semantic and philological context, we suggest that social policy poses an inherent dilemma: in aiming to stabilize or improve the existing social order, it also acts as an agent of change. This characteristic of social policy is what makes particularly valuable studies that allow for comparisons across time, place, and types of political regime. By examining a range of cases from across Europe over the course of the twentieth century, this collection seeks to pose new questions about the role of the state; ideas about risk and security; and conceptions of the “social” in its various forms.

This article demonstrates how T. H. Marshall's conceptualisation of sociology -its subject, key questions, and methodology -was embedded within broader moments in twentieth-century political history, including two world wars, the economic crisis of the interwar era, the onset of the Cold War and the rise of decolonization. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines (particularly sociology) together with more recent trends in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe, including research on post-war democratization, reconstruction and the global spread of human rights discourses. Marshall The cycles of popularity of Marshall's work follow broadly the lines of key developments of political history. This article seeks to demonstrate how Marshall's specific conceptualization of sociology -its subject, key questions, and methodology -was embedded in these developments, reflected them, but also made significant contributions to their understanding. In doing so, it brings intellectual history and the history of academic disciplines together with more recent trends in the history of twentieth-century Europe. Marshall was a sociological thinker in what Eric Hobsbawm has called the "age of extremes," and he developed his ideas about the battle between communism, fascism, liberalism and social 3 Even if it also found several detractors.

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