The ‘welfare state’ was central to the post-war consensus which lasted until the early 1970s. This purportedly (it is a matter of debate) saw broad political agreement based on Keynesian economic management, and ‘welfare state’ consolidation and expansion. Consequently, the period has been described as that of the ‘classic welfare state’. The Conservative Party dominated politically, being in office from 1951 to 1964, and again from 1970 to 1974. Partly as a result of the success of Problems of Social Policy, Titmuss was appointed as the first Professor of Social Administration at the LSE, where he remained for the rest of his life. As is often remarked, this appointment was unusual, not least in Titmuss’s lack of formal academic qualifications.
His department had been, prior to his arrival, primarily concerned with training social workers. Titmuss set about developing, indeed creating, what would ultimately be called the field of Social Policy, at first almost single-handedly, and became its pre-eminent figure. Titmuss moved Social Administration away from vocational training, or simply describing the social services. Although he did not neglect such matters, he also sought to promote original research, and to influence policy. This partly explains the eventual abandonment, near the end of Titmuss’s life, of the term ‘Social Administration’, and its replacement by ‘Social Policy’ (although the passing of ‘Social Administration’ was lamented by some).4 The field’s expansion, led by the LSE, further involved the recruitment of individuals who themselves became among its leading figures, for example Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend. The Titmuss group became known, collectively, as the ‘Titmice’. This was not a very good joke, could be used either affectionately or satirically, and the expression will not be employed again (confusingly, Titmuss used it to refer to himself and Kay),5 but it does convey the tight-knit nature of the group around Titmuss, and his leadership role within it.
The eminent sociologist, T.H. Marshall, instrumental in Titmuss’s appointment, acknowledged in his own work on Social Policy his intellectual debt to his colleagues at the LSE, ‘most of whom are now members of the remarkable team headed by Professor Titmuss’.6 In a lecture in 1972, the Cambridge economist, and later Nobel Prize winner, James Meade, expressed his gratitude for the comments of ‘that remarkable triad of professors – Titmuss, Townsend and Abel-Smith – who were responsible for putting (poverty) back into the political arena’.7 More critically, in the mid-1960s Geoffrey Howe, a rising star in the Conservative Party who frequently crossed swords with Titmuss, identified one recent manifestation of the Fabian Society as ‘Prof Titmuss and his insidious circus of disciples at the London School of Economics’. This piece was entitled ‘The Fabian Threat to Freedom’.8 For Howe, and those of like mind, state welfare created dependency, while diminishing individual responsibility and freedom of choice. Nor were critics confined to the political right. The 1960s also saw the rise of the New Left. Primarily an intellectual movement based around re-readings of Marx, the New Left gained some traction in higher education, notably through its journal New Left Review. Ralph Miliband, an LSE colleague of Titmuss’s (although distinctly uncollegial when it came to the Department of Social Administration), wrote in the Review’s 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