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).
As to his aspirations for his emerging field, Titmuss told an American sociologist he frequently cited, Robert Merton, that ‘in thinking about the subject of social policy research’ he had been stimulated by one of Merton’s papers.19 Published in 1949, this had discussed the extent to which social science could, and should, influence policy. In a passage which may have especially appealed to Titmuss, Merton argued that the ‘higher the social standing of a discipline, the more likely it will be to recruit able talents, the greater its measure of financial support, and the greater its actual accomplishments’.20 By the time of Titmuss’s correspondence with Merton, 1957, he had recruited ‘talents’ such as Abel-Smith, was actively pursuing research funding, and had already made a difference to policy making by way of, most notably, the Guillebaud Committee’s enquiry into NHS finances.
There can be no doubt that Titmuss was viewed, at least on the liberal left, as pre-eminent in analyses of the ‘welfare state’. This was further recognised in obituaries, and subsequent recollections. Marshall claimed that Titmuss had ‘exerted an influence, academic and political, at home and abroad, which has not been surpassed by any British social scientist of his generation’.21 Commenting on another aspect of Titmuss’s work, one often neglected, A.J. Isserlis pointed to his role in promoting better race relations through, especially, membership of the Community Relations Commission between 1968 and 1971. Titmuss’s approach was underpinned by ‘an awareness of the structural economic and social weaknesses in the community that created or threatened disadvantage for black, brown and white alike’.22 Tributes were not confined to Britain. The social policy writer and sometime US federal official, Alvin Schorr, in an edited volume on American child welfare services, observed that Titmuss had died while the collection was being completed. It was a ‘mark of his influence’, Schorr wrote, ‘that besides myself, three of the authors represented here in one way or another took instruction from him’. Taken as a whole, the volume variously expressed ‘three general points of view that (Titmuss) spent his life representing or exploring’, namely ‘an emphasis on the distributive consequences of social policy … a stubborn belief in altruism as a motive power for social policy … and a preoccupation with how individuals fare in social policy’.23 And, as we shall see, for some Titmuss’s legacy endures in the twenty-first century.
Understanding Titmuss: David Reisman
The present volume is the first full-scale account of Titmuss’s life. But here we should acknowledge David Reisman’s pioneering work, first published in 1977. Outside of Titmuss’s daughter Ann Oakley’s partly biographical (and autobiographical) accounts, this is the only full-length study of Titmuss’s ideas and, to a much lesser extent, his life.24 A second edition appeared in 2001. What did Reisman have to say? We can only give a flavour here, while acknowledging that much of what he argues, and his attempt to assemble a coherent account of what Titmuss was about, retains value. Reisman is complimentary about Titmuss in that he sees him as an ‘original, creative and sensitive thinker whose work has not always won the understanding it deserves’. He was, moreover, a ‘maverick and an outsider’. In terms of ideas, Titmuss was, for example, a ‘believer in voluntarism and getting involved’, unsurprising for someone who was a ‘committed communitarian’. Nonetheless, he had little to say about the voluntary sector’s role in welfare provision, in part because Titmuss derived his conviction from ‘value-consensus’, arguing that ‘the citizen, where dependent, has a right to service. Voluntarism, however, is by its very nature discretionary’. Reisman also draws attention to what he considers some of Titmuss’s weaknesses. He ‘never saw the need to make his underlying system fully explicit’ (one of Reisman’s aspirations), while his argument that the Second World War had generated post-1945 social reconstruction was inadequate when explaining other welfare systems. As Reisman puts it, ‘Titmuss was an English author. In describing the relationship between welfare and war, Titmuss knew that he was writing about his own country, and not about the whole of the race’. Concluding, Reisman suggests that nobody before or since Titmuss ‘has produced an intellectual map capable of situating and integrating so large a number of seemingly unconnected