first edition of the ‘sickness of Labourism’. The Labour Party had, admittedly, made some moderate gains in the post-war era, but these were the exception, not the rule. What was needed was an actively socialist programme, and Miliband was sceptical about this being formulated by Labour as presently constituted. By such accounts, welfare propped up, rather than challenged, capitalism.9
Titmuss and his circle were at various points highly influential on Labour’s welfare thinking, part of the reason behind Howe’s attack, and Miliband’s disdain. Arthur Seldon of the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), another long-time Titmuss adversary, remarked in the mid-1990s that while, generally speaking, ‘Ideas Are Not Enough’, nonetheless in the 1960s ‘sociologists’ played a central role in Labour Party policy. He cited the activities of, among others, Abel-Smith and Townsend – however, no doubt deliberately, he declined to mention Titmuss himself.10 More sympathetically, David Donnison, a Titmuss recruit to the LSE in 1956, noted Titmuss’s contribution, on Labour’s behalf, to areas such as social security reform.11 The return of a Labour government in 1964 raised expectations for positive welfare measures. But caution is required here. It has been argued that the Titmuss group was highly influential in shaping Labour’s pensions policy in the mid-1950s, but much less so in the late 1960s, the group’s ongoing close relationship to leading Labour politicians notwithstanding.12 It was perhaps such limitations which made another former colleague, David Piachaud, remark, in an otherwise sympathetic obituary, that in ‘terms of direct political influence Titmuss was not outstanding’.13
Titmuss did not place the various dimensions of his work in separate compartments, and others clearly saw him in this holistic light. In 1960, for instance, he was approached by Kingsley Martin, editor of the left-wing journal New Statesman. Martin told him that Richard Crossman, prominent Labour politician and longstanding Titmuss supporter, had suggested that he ‘might be induced to spend a few evenings trying to work out some unofficial policy on such subjects as education, science and the state and nuclear development’. Other members of the proposed small group were to be the scientist, novelist, and senior civil servant C.P. Snow, and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Patrick Blackett. Martin hoped that Titmuss would join them, commenting that there was a ‘complete absence of serious thinking on the Left’.14 It is unclear whether Titmuss did meet up with the others, but that he was invited to do so is a tribute to the intellectual esteem in which he was held. We can see here, too, the Labour Party seeking to embrace modernisation, a move which culminated in Harold Wilson’s famous praise, the ‘white heat’ of the new ‘scientific revolution’, a phenomenon with which Snow and Blackett were closely associated.15 But it was as an authority on welfare that Titmuss was most well-known, with Crossman describing him, in 1971, as ‘one of the great creative minds of our social services’.16
If Titmuss’s life began at the time of the Edwardian Liberal welfare reforms, and embraced the coming of the ‘welfare state’, what was the situation as it came to an end? By the early 1970s the post-war consensus was under threat. While the ‘welfare state’ had always had its critics, it now faced serious challenges. The IEA’s free-market ideas, to take but one, were gaining ground, and were avidly consumed by Margaret Thatcher, soon to be Conservative Party leader. The era of neo-liberalism was about to commence, something which would have profoundly disturbed Titmuss. On one level, relating an individual life to the events and processes which that life witnessed is a conceit. But using Titmuss’s lifespan as a sort of framing device is, nonetheless, revealing. It is particularly so with regard to the span of his academic career, coinciding as it did with the era of the ‘classic welfare state’.
Titmuss’s contribution to social analysis took various forms. In the case of publications, these ranged from scholarly monographs to short newspaper articles. There were a lot of them. Matthew Hough has identified nearly 200 pieces, conceivably an underestimate.17 The present volume engages with just under 100 published items, not including book reviews or letters to the press, both of which Titmuss also used to bring his ideas to public attention. He was, too, a frequent contributor to radio programmes from the 1940s onwards, and later appeared several times on television. Titmuss was, to put it mildly, keen to get his ideas across. It is important to stress this point. Titmuss was not the sort of social scientist who, for example, conducted interviews or dealt with the ‘clients’ of the ‘welfare state’ face to face. Rather, his research strength lay in the analysis of large volumes of empirical data. The resulting analyses were then to be disseminated as widely as possible, and used to inform policy formation. Such was Titmuss’s dominance of his field up to his death that his ideas are seen as constituting a ‘paradigm’.
To give some flavour of this, we take an article from 1964, revealingly entitled ‘The Limits of the Welfare State’. For Titmuss, ‘neo-classical economics and the private market’ could not deal with social costs deriving from, for instance, the impact of automation on the labour market or, and here he took a distressing contemporary example, the effect of the drug thalidomide. This had been prescribed, without proper testing, to pregnant women in 1963–64, resulting in deformities to their children. It was a central claim of Titmuss’s that the free market (or economic growth itself, for that matter) could not deal adequately with social dislocation, social inequality, and social injustice. As he often did, Titmuss next gave an historical account of how welfare had developed in the capitalist West. He then posed questions such as ‘Has “The Welfare State” abolished poverty, social deprivation and exploitation?’ Some argued precisely this point, especially those social scientists propounding the ‘end of ideology’ – that is, that a consensus on social and economic affairs had been reached in the Western democracies, and that economic growth had eliminated poverty, as manifested by the emergence, by the 1960s, of ‘The Affluent Society’. For Titmuss this was wrong on various counts, not least that it was ‘unhistorical’. In Britain there was growing evidence that income inequality had increased, not decreased, since 1945. It was necessary, therefore, to ‘find imaginative ways and new institutional means of combining humanity in administration with redistributive social justice in the future development of welfare policies’. In order to enable this, society needed ‘different rules domestically to live by; more examples of altruism to look up to’.18
Such a brief summary does scant justice to Titmuss’s arguments. But we can discern some of his principal concerns. These included scepticism about the free market (and, consequently, free-market economists), and the need to locate contemporary social developments in their historical context. Notable, too, is that the advent of the ‘welfare state’ had not, contrary to certain current analyses, solved society’s problems, and indeed that some of these were increasing – notably inequality. And we encounter for the first time in this volume Titmuss’s promotion of ‘altruism’, his belief that, at their best, individuals could care for the wellbeing of strangers, and that this could, and should, be promoted by the state acting on behalf of society as a whole. Social services could encourage such altruistic behaviour if properly constructed, and humanely and flexibly administered. One component of this was that ‘welfare professionals’ should act not in their own interests, but in the interests of those they served. Such issues underpinned Titmuss’s approach to welfare, giving his ideas considerable intellectual strength (as well as certain intellectual weaknesses).
