Social policy as a field of academic study was developed in Britain in the years after the Second World War. This article first explores the way the study of social policy developed in Britain, showing how it discovered a need to have a more theoretical and a more comparative approach and to come to terms with the increasingly difficult political and economic environment for social policy. It goes on to outline the way in which British social policy itself has changed and to consider the problematical elements in its future. It then tries to draw some more general lessons about future directions for social policy throughout the world, and in Taiwan in particular. It ends by arguing that an emergent academic community concerned to teach about and research social policy needs to establish itself as able to make a major contribution to the study of the very wide spectrum of public policies concerned with regulating the impact of economic developments on society.