Facing the Future

This chapter examines Young’s work as founding chair of the Social Science Research Council between 1965 and 1968 in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson. It describes how Young responded to increasing anxieties about the nature of planning and expertise in the British civil service by arguing that the social sciences should play a more prominent role in government policy making. The chapter focuses mainly on Young’s Committee on the Next Thirty Years, and his proposals for an Institute of Forecasting Studies, which he unsuccessfully sought to develop as part of a transnational forecasting movement with the support of foreign intellectuals such as the American sociologist Daniel Bell and the French futurologist Bertrand de Jouvenel. The chapter also discusses the intellectual networks associated with the popular social science journal New Society, showing that this group promoted libertarian and state-critical perspectives on urban planning, and radical economic ideas like negative income tax. While the Next Thirty Years Committee was short-lived, it reflected Young’s career-long conviction that public policy should be guided by interdisciplinary social science.

‘Bigness is the Enemy of Humanity’

This chapter examines Michael Young’s work as Head of the Labour Party Research Department between 1945 and 1951 in the Labour government led by Clement Attlee. It outlines Young’s early life, discussing his close relationship with the philanthropists Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, his education at the progressive Dartington Hall School, and his work for the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP) in the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter discusses Young’s central role in PEP’s ‘Active Democracy’ project, which sought to examine citizens’ experience of local government, the social services, and the workplace from a psychological and sociological perspective. It also describes how Young actively sought to promote the social sciences in government, submitting a series of memoranda that called on the Labour Party to incorporate child psychology, industrial psychology, and psychologically informed understandings of urban planning into policy making, and recommended the creation of a Social Science Research Council. The chapter concludes by arguing that while many of Young’s ideas were overlooked by the Attlee government, the networks which he cultivated through the Labour Party and Political and Economic Planning were important to the development of British social science.

‘We Were All Very Sick and Very Stupid’

This chapter discusses the Conference on the Psychological and Sociological Problems of Modern Socialism held at University College Oxford in 1945. This event featured prominent left-wing policy makers, intellectuals, and social scientists, including the MP Evan Durbin, the political theorist G. D. H. Cole, the writer and politician Margaret Cole, the child psychologist John Bowlby, the historian R. H. Tawney, and Michael Young, who was then the Secretary of the Labour Party Research Department. The conference reflected multiple strands of inter-war and mid-twentieth century political thought and social science which emphasized the political and social importance of small groups, notably through guild socialist arguments for pluralistic forms of political organization, and theories about human attachment drawn from child psychology. The views expressed at the conference reflected a sense that active and participatory democracy was not just morally right but psychologically necessary to prevent popular political radicalization, limit the appeal of totalitarianism, and promote peaceful civil society. The chapter concludes by noting that the events of the conference, and the intellectual influences that it represented, would subsequently shape Michael Young’s project to promote social science within the Labour Party during the later years of the Attlee government.

‘For Richer, For Poorer’

Chapter 3 examines an unpublished policy document that Young submitted to the Labour Party Policy Committee in 1952 called ‘For Richer, For Poorer’, which marked a transition from Young’s public policy career towards sociology and social research. Young left his position in the Labour Party Research Department after the Conservative election victory in the 1951 general election, and undertook a Ph.D. in social administration at the London School of Economics supervised by the social policy thinker Richard Titmuss. Responding to the Labour Party’s failure to appeal to women voters in the 1951 election, ‘For Richer, For Poorer’ urged the Labour Party to pay more attention to family policy. Young integrated a historical vision of declining social cohesion caused by industrialization and suburbanization with contemporary concerns about the poverty of women and children that built on the work of earlier social poverty researchers and the feminist campaigns for a family allowance led by Eleanor Rathbone. This document reflected a turn in Young’s thought away from the focus on full employment and macro-economic planning which had characterized much of his policy work during the Attlee government, and towards thinking about social policy from the perspective of those he conceived of as non-workers, including the elderly, the unemployed, children, and women.

The Institute of Community Studies, 1953–1958

Chapter 4 turns to the Institute of Community Studies, the Bethnal Green-based social research organization where Young and his colleague Peter Willmott published probably their best-known work, the 1957 Family and Kinship in East London. This and other Institute of Community Studies publications, such as Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, suggested that the family and extended family were crucial sources of mutual aid and social support for working-class communities, and that this aspect of working-class life had been overlooked by middle-class policy makers and urban planners who thought in terms of a more isolated and conventionally middle-class ‘nuclear’ family of parents and young children. This chapter shows that while Young and his colleagues did detect strong kinship networks in the communities they studied, their emphasis on the extended family was informed by a variety of contemporary developments in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and by a political project to challenge the Labour Party’s emphasis on male labour and suggest that the extended family could provide an alternative to the workplace as a site of social solidarity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of women in Young’s dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, which argues that Young idealized women, and the relationships between them, for being less defined by work and professional status.

Conclusion

The conclusion describes how the Social Science Research Council, and in particular the discipline of sociology, came under increasing attack by Conservative policy makers in the 1970s and 1980s. It briefly outlines Young’s biography and career after 1970, and summarizes the key arguments of the book as a whole. The conclusion cautions against populist and communitarian arguments which idealize nostalgic visions of community, pointing out that Young’s portrayals of the East London working class were ideologically and politically motivated, and did not fully account for changing gender norms or the impact of immigration. The book concludes by re-emphasizing the importance of the social sciences in twentieth-century politics and political thought, and argues that historians should continue to take their role in modern British history seriously.

From Kinship to Consumerism

This chapter examines the intellectual context for the Consumers’ Association, which Young operated from the headquarters of the Institute of Community Studies from 1956 onwards, and the way in which Young, Townsend, and other members of the Institute of Community Studies grappled with the social changes associated with increased affluence such as suburbanization and increasing identification with the middle class. It argues that Young’s concern with consumerism was informed by ethical concerns about quality of life, and challenges conceptual divisions between the Labour ‘revisionist’ tradition concerned with distributive questions and the more humanistic or ethical socialism associated with Young and other left-wing sociologists. Drawing on the Institute of Community Studies’ work on suburban communities in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Young’s sociology lectures at Cambridge delivered between 1961 and 1963, I show that Young’s consumerism derived from his evolving view of the family. While Young had argued that the extended family had represented an important site of mutual aid and solidarity for working-class women in industrial society, he now suggested that suburbanization and affluence had returned the nuclear family to a position of social and economic pre-eminence.

Introduction

The introduction outlines Michael Young’s biography and numerous contributions to British politics, social science, and social activism. It explains how historians have frequently used the concept of an ‘ethical socialist’ tradition to describe aspects of British progressive politics concerned with fellowship, community, and quality of life, and argues that in the period after the Second World War this ethical tradition was expressed through the social sciences. While Young’s ideas have received attention from political historians and policy makers, the introduction argues that they have not been properly understood in the context of mid-twentieth-century social science. Discussing a recent movement amongst historians of modern Britain to critically re-examine social scientific understandings of twentieth-century British society, I argue that scholars should treat the social sciences as an important influence on the history of the British left.