Planning was seen as the solution to such ills, based as it was, or claimed to be, on empiricism and rationalism. To put it another way, it was ‘scientific’. Planning thus appealed to what Arthur Marwick famously described as ‘middle opinion’, that is those critical of both free-market capitalism and Soviet communism, found in groups such as PEP, the Popular Front, the Next Five Years Group, and Lloyd George’s Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction.9 Titmuss was linked to a number of these bodies, and was close to some of their leading figures. For instance, the Next Five Years Group included Laurence Cadbury and Eleanor Rathbone.10
But to return to Titmuss’s underlying philosophy, also in 1941 The New Statesman and Nation, a leading journal of progressive opinion whose readership was expanding rapidly under Kingsley Martin’s editorship, published Titmuss’s punchy, provocatively titled, article, ‘The End of Economic Parenthood’. This was a relatively short piece, but worth considering closely as it articulates further some of the ideas hinted at in the Town and Country Planning piece, most notably social attitudes towards families and family size, and, underlying this, what Titmuss saw as modern capitalism’s warping of morality. The broader context of both these pieces is crucial. The bombing of British towns and cities was a recent memory, bringing, as it had, huge physical damage, a large number of civilian casualties, and, as in autumn 1939, the movement of significant numbers of people out of the country’s urban areas – events described by Titmuss in Problems of Social Policy. And while Britain itself remained unconquered, in summer 1941 Hitler further escalated the conflict by invading the Soviet Union, initially with considerable military success. The United States had yet to enter the war, so while Britain had been reprieved, this conceivably might have been only temporary.
Titmuss started his New Statesman piece with a series of propositions with which, he suspected, most people would disagree. These were that there was a relationship between the declining birth rate and the present ‘battle for existence’, these two phenomena being ‘twin expressions of one and the same thing’, and that the growth of monopoly capitalism and the production and sale of contraceptive devices were correlated. As a rhetorical technique, this was a clever way of drawing the reader’s attention to purportedly irreconcilable positions while, simultaneously, suggesting that there might be more to them than met the eye. In any event, Titmuss continued, there were only two ways under human control which could lead to humanity’s extinction: mass suicide and the failure to reproduce. Again this is rhetorically clever, implying that the war itself was a form of mass suicide, and that the failure to reproduce might, too, be seen in this light. Given that Britain, with the rest of Europe, was failing to reproduce its population, two consequences of the conflict were possible, namely a ‘tremendous speed up … in the process of the dying out of the human race’, or a ‘complete reversal in our way of life so that an environment will emerge in which parents desire children’. Titmuss stressed that he was talking about the advanced capitalist societies, as the population of countries such as China was bound to rise ‘by hundreds of millions’ over the next 50 years. Although he did not have space to discuss this, the consequences of ‘an enormously increasing Asiatic population’ for the future of mankind raised ‘the most fundamental questions’.11
But why, in Western societies, should parents have to be encouraged to ‘desire’ children (a point also made in the Town and Country Planning piece)? Among the characteristics of such societies over recent decades were improvements in public health and the greater availability of contraception. So capitalist societies had gained more and more control over both the death rate and the birth rate. Focusing on the latter, why had the ability to control it been increasingly exercised? Here we can begin to discern what was to be a consistent theme in Titmuss’s thought, for he argued that the most ‘fundamental factor’ was the ‘psychological atmosphere of a society which places acquisitiveness before children’. Humanity’s impulse to serve the community – the ‘altruism’ which became increasingly central to Titmuss’s philosophy – had been denied by a society which told people that they must seek their own interests. Individuals were encouraged to regard wealth as ‘an index of biological success’, use that wealth to seek power, and ‘relegate morals to a two-hour session of platitudes on the seventh day’. In such an environment, one which was an ‘unpleasant, unhealthy, and immoral blend of acquisitiveness and fear’, children were viewed as ‘economic handicaps’.12
Nor, in reality, did competitive individualism achieve much in terms of upward mobility because of the ‘chains of a static society’. Consequently, the struggle for success became ‘more and more demoniac’. Given the identification of children as economic burdens, so individuals increasingly controlled reproduction, and thus expressed in ‘a biological sense … feelings of moral frustration’. Such frustration created a ‘morally unhealthy society’, and all that had happened in inter-war international relations was ‘but an outward expression of an inward disease’. Modern war was, then, a ‘temporary index of a morally unhealthy society’. Even worse, though, a ‘declining replacement rate’ was a ‘permanent expression of the same thing’. The present conflict, therefore, was not just another bout of Anglo-German antagonism, or even a more generalised expression of human nature, it was also ‘a reflection on a mass scale of the individual’s disease’. The end of an era had been reached, and ‘vast and permanent changes’ were needed to Britain’s way of life. Failure to reverse the ‘refusal to reproduce’ might result in ‘some other species, perhaps a race of sub-men’, arising ‘to take our place’. Control of fertility was essential, Titmuss conceded, to ‘a rational world civilization’. But without an understanding of what it could mean, ‘then control means extinction’. Thus in 1941 Britain was fighting not only for national survival, but also to ‘release that deep, long-frustrated desire in man to serve humanity and not self’.13 Titmuss, it should be emphasised, was not alone in his concerns about the psychological impact of modernity. As Mathew Thomson shows, psychology had a huge cultural impact, at both popular and intellectual levels, in post-1918 Britain. It was also beginning to influence left-wing political thought, most notably in the work of the economist Evan Durbin (encountered in Chapter 3), much admired by, among others, Tawney.14
R.H. Tawney and The Acquisitive Society
These two pieces tell us much about Titmuss’s approach by the early 1940s, and should be seen alongside, for example, the contemporaneous arguments encountered Chapter 3 where Titmuss had used the platform of Unser Kampf to make similar points. They again show, too, Titmuss reaching out to different audiences: the general, informed, readership of The New Statesman and the more specialist readers of Town and Country Planning. In terms of ideas, an obvious starting place is that parents must once again ‘desire’ children, rather than seeing them as economic handicaps. But they were being denied the opportunity to so by the ethos of an acquisitive society, a particular expression of monopoly capitalism. Once more, we find a clear acknowledgement of Tawney’s notion of an ‘acquisitive society’, a society which, in one formulation by Tawney, had grown ‘sick through the absence of a moral ideal’.15 It is thus important to outline briefly what ethical socialism involved, and Tawney’s account of why society had been taken ‘sick’, an idea also adopted by Titmuss.
Ethical socialism has been described as a ‘radical tradition which makes heroic claims on people and on the society that nurtures them’. It offered a ‘guide to social reform aimed at creating optimal conditions for the highest possible moral attainments of every person’ and, as such, was a theory both of human nature and of society. The ‘good society’, then,
