You Got an Ology?

In the decades after the Second World War, sociology was a vogue subject in British universities, eclipsing more traditional disciplines such as history and political philosophy. New departments sprang up in the expanding universities. Academics in other subjects reacted in different ways, some embracing sociology in the hope that some of its cachet would rub off on them, others denouncing it for not being a real subject. By the 1970s, though, the fortunes of sociology were dramatically reversed, as radical sociologists clashed with their more empirical colleagues, and were blamed by the press for inciting student protest. The radical sociologist became a folk devil, epitomized by Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), and was particularly demonized by the supporters of Margaret Thatcher. The Thatcher governments attempted to reduce sociology’s funding in higher education, but they found it harder to reverse its more diffusive influence over other disciplines and popular culture as a whole.

The Reluctant Planner

T. H. Marshall’s claims that the twentieth century was the era of social rights, embodied in education and welfare policy, has found enduring favour with a wide variety of scholars and social commentators. To what extent, however, was his theory of citizenship and social rights a reflection of the specific moment in which he was writing? This chapter places T. H. Marshall’s concept of ‘citizenship’ within its historical context. Through examining his biography, this essay suggests that Marshall’s theory of citizenship was informed by an appreciation for continental, and especially German, conceptions of social policy, the role of the state, and the nature of community. Parsing this aspect of Marshall’s intellectual biography has important implications for our own understanding of British ideas about the purpose, structure, and scope of social policy during the formative middle decades of the twentieth century.

‘The Organized Selfishness of Empire’

This essay examines T. H. Green’s evolving ideas on empire. Professor of moral philosophy in Oxford until his death in 1882, Green was the most prominent and respected philosophical idealist in Victorian Britain. The influence of his personal example and of his ideas has been traced by Jose Harris and other historians of the welfare state down to the 1940s. Initially enthusiastic for the civilizing mission of empire, Green came to see that any political system or relationship imposed by force, or dependent on coercion or control, was intrinsically incompatible with the ideals of citizenship, voluntarism, and solidarity that define the good community and make possible the self-realization of individuals within it. The essay opens up a new field for discussion and research: the relationship between idealist welfare thinking and imperialism. It argues that empire had a major impact on idealist notions of social welfare.

A New Governance

When governance refers to changes in the state, it refers to the apparent spread of markets, contracting out, networks, and joined-up government. This chapter initially focuses on the intellectual sources of the transformation of the state, highlighting the role of modernist social science, with its reliance on formal explanations based on either economic models or sociological correlations. The first wave of reform occurred as an economic modernism inspired marketization and the new public management. The second wave occurred as a sociological modernism inspired joined-up governance and networks. The second half of the chapter shifts the focus from the sources of the reforms to their impact on practices. It relies on a series of short ethnographic stories to illustrate the complex ways in which public servants juggle the competing demands of bureaucracies, markets, and networks.

Conservative Thinkers and the Post-War State, 1945–79

This chapter examines the reaction of conservative thinkers between 1945 and 1979 to the growth of the post-war state in Britain. It argues that in the earlier post-war period conservatives were broadly united in opposing the state’s growth on the basis of arguments put forward by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott rejected arguments based on libertarianism or natural law, but nevertheless emphasized the importance of upholding individual liberty, stressing the value of traditional constitutional arrangements, private property, patriotism, and the rule of law. However, by the 1960s and 1970s, the challenges of the permissive society, an increasingly large tax burden, and constitutional problems associated with both the EEC and Scottish and Welsh nationalism led to a wide variety of responses. Some stressed the importance of upholding the state’s authority, others the necessity of lowering taxes, and others again the vital nature of constitutional reform.

Introduction

The introduction to this book considers the ways in which the history of modern social welfare in Britain has been written and explained. These approaches include biographical and prosopographical studies of key individuals and groups responsible for founding the welfare state and administering it; the study of crucial social policies and institutions; appreciation of the key intellectual concepts which underpin the idea of welfare in Britain, including philosophical idealism, citizenship, planning, and social equality; the role of political contestation in the initiation and also in the obstruction of policy and its implementation; and the relation of specific places to the development of welfare in theory and in practice, whether east London in the late Victorian era or west London in the 1960s, both of which districts and the social innovations deriving from them are examined in chapters in this volume.

Richard Titmuss versus the IEA

An influential strand of Jose Harris’s research has emphasized the importance of idealist political thought to the rise and fall of the British welfare state. Harris argues that the mid-twentieth-century demise of political theory about social policy left the welfare state vulnerable because its defenders lacked a philosophical discourse with the depth of idealism. This chapter tests this argument by looking in more detail at a case study from the post-1945 discussion about the welfare state: the debate between the group of socialist social policy academics associated with Richard Titmuss and the neo-liberals at the Institute of Economic Affairs spearheaded by Arthur Seldon. The chapter demonstrates that while the defenders of the Beveridgean welfare state lacked theoretical firepower when confronted by a philosophical counterblast from the right, the major weakness of the left’s social policy analysis was in fact a failure to contest the neo-liberal appropriation of economic theory.

Planning in Modern Britain

Human beings have always planned, but the meaning, methods, and purpose of planning have changed over time and with circumstance. Planning has been politicized ever more widely as the individual’s ‘personal’ planning has succumbed before, or been reinforced by, planning by the state at its local, national, and international levels. Secularization entails the utopia’s transfer from heaven to earth, and in this process nineteenth-century Chartist populism, liberal moralism, and conservative paternalism all played their part. In the twentieth century, both Labour and Conservative parties merged all three into a statist and interventionist programme accelerated by the interwar depression and by the post-war need to validate democracy in the face of the Soviet pretensions. The essay concludes by discussing the contrasting approaches to planning required in four areas of twentieth-century government: education, welfare, the economy, and the environment.

The Civic Moment in British Social Thought

This essay is a contribution to the conceptual history of citizenship at the time when it came to enjoy greater influence than before or since, the period of the advent of democratic politics following the Third Reform Act. It analyses the use of the language of citizenship in a range of intellectual contexts, from philosophical idealists through Anglican and nonconformist social reformers to the co-operative movement. In comparison with the continental European states, where citizenship carried strong connotations of political belonging and legal rights, in Britain citizenship was embedded in civil society and the city, and was bound up with ethical notions such as character and neighbourliness. Above all, it was a powerful tool in the conceptualization of the good society and of social reform.

Private Benefit, Public Finance?

This chapter explores the way in which developments in the apparently rather narrow field of undergraduate finance tell us something about perceptions of the university in the late twentieth century and, more importantly, about how debates over higher education illuminate wider attitudes to the relationship between the individual, the state, and civil society. It also uses these debates—and the legislation they inspired—to discuss the difficulties the state and other actors faced in dealing with higher education in an era characterized by anxieties about Britain’s perceived decline, and about inequities in British society. The tangled and tortured development of student finance in the last four decades of the twentieth century illustrates the value of Jose Harris’s approach, whilst also enabling historians to trace the longer-lasting legacy of idealist thought.