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In this chapter, Robert Pinker discusses Richard Titmuss's role in the making of British social policy studies after World War II. He begins with his impressions of Titmuss and his early experiences, and how his thoughts on the ends and means of social policy developed to maturity. In 1950, Titmuss published Problems of Social Policy, a study of the impact of war on British civil society and the response of the social services. During that same year, he was appointed to the Chair of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. Pinker considers a number of distinctive and often controversial features that characterised Titmuss's collectivist and unitary approach to the discussion of social policy and social problems. He also talks about the ‘conditional’ as opposed to what Titmuss claims is the open-ended nature of altruism and reciprocity in everyday life by focusing on on Titmuss's 1970 book The Gift Relationship.

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.

This chapter argues that the marked upswing of interest in informal care in the UK beginning in the 1970s reflected a reaction to some features of the work of Richard Titmuss and ‘traditional social administration’, work that, on examination, reveals a distinctive ‘idealist’ core, unsympathetic to research into familial patterns of caring. It first addresses some of the new work in the history of social welfare. It then examines how it can be built upon to help answer the question, itself sociologically interesting, of why the study of social policy appears to have developed research interests in informal care only since the 1970s. Furthermore, it explicitly reintroduces problems associated with Whig interpretations of the ‘welfare state’ to account for the continuing neglect of material on informal care dating from the end of the nineteenth century.

In this chapter, Robert Pinker explores the conditionality and ‘mix’ of altruism and egoism and provides theoretical and rational rather than ideological or doctrinaire justifications for welfare pluralism. He begins by discussing The Price of Blood, a monograph that reviewed the arguments for and against paying blood donors and developing a role for competitive markets in the sale and purchase of blood products. Pinker challenges Richard Titmuss's analysis of the moral qualities that underpin exchange relationships in his 1970 book The Gift Relationship. He also reflects on his works Social Theory and Social Policy (1971) and The Idea of Welfare (1979) which, together with The Gift Relationship and Julian Le Grand's Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy (2003), illustrate the ways in which the normative debate about the ends and means of social policy and its entire institutional framework has changed.

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.

In this chapter, Robert Pinker considers the ways in which different generations of students perceive the history of social policy as well as the different vantage points in time from which each of us look back on our own lives. Pinker first discusses some of the scholars who had influenced his approach to the study of social policy from the 1950s onwards, including Richard Titmuss, T.H. Marshall, Brian Abel-Smith, and O.R. McGregor. He then describes the academic context in which he started his career and wrote Social Theory and Social Policy and explains his interest in developing theories and models of social welfare for purposes of historical and comparative research. Pinker also talks about the variety of topics he explored in his research, such as the moral dynamics of welfare institutions.

War has long played a central role in discussions of the rise of the British welfare state. War did not just help create the welfare state, but shaped its nature. This paper, drawing on much recent revisionist literature, retells the story of the relations of war and welfare in this key case. It makes clear that the welfare state for service personnel and veterans was, in both world wars, different from the welfare state for the mass of the population and that there is a need to systematically consider the two over time. In peace and in war, the British state was both a welfare and a warfare state, each operating to different rules. The paper also endorses the view that the reforms in welfare of the 1920s were very much more significant than those of the Edwardian years, and indeed created a working-class welfare state which was extended to the whole population after 1945.

To establish the extent of continuity and change, the first section of this chapter outlines the historical and contemporary context from which the prevailing citizenship configuration has emerged in the UK. The changing enactment and experience of social security can be broadly characterised as a ratcheted transition from a social democratic period of welfarism (1945-1979) to a post-Keynesian era of neoliberal citizenship (1979-present day). I then turn to consider how these developments are producing new social divisions in the design and receipt of public welfare. I argue that welfare austerity is producing an increasingly bifurcated system of social citizenship that has come to authenticate the status and reward the practices of some, to the exclusion and denigration of others. Drawing on secondary quantitative analysis, the distributional effects arising from this are considered for those at the bottom, middle and top of the income distribution. The remainder of the chapter describes two conditions that emerge from the shifting logic of welfare galvanised through public service reform and fiscal recalibration: the Validated Active Citizen and the Residual Contingent Citizen. These categories are outlined to understand how the variegated praxis of social citizenship shapes the identity and status of notionally equal citizens.