This chapter provides an illustration of the elements of what may be considered to be heterodox economic thinking on the nature of social welfare and social control, and the relationships between them. We assume that social welfare relates to a class of functions, such as education, economic security, health care, and housing, which are provided by, or associated with the welfare state in developed or high-income capitalist economies. 1 This is not to say that the state necessarily delivers services in those areas, but is responsible for their provisioning, implying also some varying forms of financial commitment. Our description departs from the neoclassical economic interpretation of social welfare, which is largely delineated by welfare economics, following utilitarian and/or Paretian reasoning in attempting to establish and measure well-being (Mandler 1999). Heterodox economic approaches reject the philosophical basis of this notion of social welfare (Lawson 2006). Instead, according to Lawson, heterodoxy is concerned with the analysis of the social structures and processes that influence material well-being.