In this second edition, I return partly to fill some of the gaps that I left in the earlier edition, to bring my account up to date, to correct or clarify certain elements of my argument and to improve some of my explanations. But more fundamentally, I want to make a more explicit theoretical contribution regarding the essential nature of human need. I want to re-address questions concerning ‘humanity’ and need; regarding the constitutive essence of the human species and the essential normative or ethical principles associated with human being. To do this, I have had to restructure the book quite significantly. As human beings we struggle to define our needs but the suggestion with which this book now concludes is that it is by our needs that human beings are defined and define themselves. In this sense, we are what we need. Though it retains elements of the first edition, this is now a very different and, I hope, more interesting book. And, while it has been written partly with social policy students in mind, it now has relevance, I believe, to a very much wider audience.
This chapter will introduce the reader to the contested nature of human needs, but then:
•explain the importance of human need by:
◊illustrating how concepts of need figure in central, albeit diverse, ways in our everyday lives and everyday discourse;
◊critically reinterpreting the vital yet contested distinction between absolute need and relative need that continues to dominate and constrain social scientific analysis and debate.
•outline the contents of the rest of this book.
This chapter sets out to explain that ‘need’, though it is a central term in social policy, has proved to be an elusive concept. It will demonstrate how understandings of human need may be reflected not only through social policies but also in wider interpretations – whether commonplace or philosophical – of the ‘human condition’ (Arendt, 1958).
Competing concepts of human need, whether express or implied, are present within all the social sciences. Academic social policy, as an inter- and multidisciplinary subject, draws from across the social sciences including sociology, economics, politics and elements of psychology, philosophy and much else besides. Need, it has been said, is a concept that is ‘central to social policy making’ (Erskine, 2002: 158). Unfortunately, need is also a concept that is interpreted in a mind-boggling variety of ways. Des Gasper has described the proceedings of an academic workshop convened in the 1990s as part of a research project on human needs and wants as follows:
… it became evident that the participants – psychologists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists – held to no consistent usage of ‘need’, as individuals, not only across disciplines. Yet most of us had read and thought about needs since the 1960s or 1970s. We jumped between different usages almost from one sentence to the next: between … more basic needs versus satisfiers; and verbs versus nouns – and also between needs as explanatory forces and factors, needs as (pre)requisites, and needs as particular sorts of moral priority claims. (Gasper, 2007: 54)
There is a virtually inexhaustible supply of binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of human need, many of which we shall encounter in the course of this book (see Table 1.1 and also the select glossary at the beginning of the book). Many of these distinctions overlap or coincide with each other. Some may be more helpful than others. To pursue them all in any depth would be as exhausting for the reader as for the author. The literature on human need is also replete with a similarly inexhaustible supply of thought experiments and anecdotal vignettes with which to illustrate a variety of philosophical conundrums. They will be used sparingly, if at all, because they can lead readers (and this author) to a sense of despair and inadequacy since nobody has been clever enough to solve every conundrum.
Table 1.1: Binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of need
| absolute | … | relative |
| objective | … | subjective |
| basic | … | higher |
| material | … | non-material |
| positive | … | negative |
| non-instrumental | … | instrumental |
| non-derivative | … | derivative |
| physical/somatic | … | mental/spiritual |
| physiological | … | cultural |
| viscerogenic | … | sociogenic |
| intrinsic | … | procedural |
| natural | … | artificial |
| true | … | false |
| constitutional | … | circumstantial |
| inherent | … | interpreted |
| thin | … | thick |
In this book we shall attempt to weave the disputed threads into a categorisation of needs concepts and to develop a theoretical proposition concerning the relationship between human interdependency, needs and rights. The aim is to pick out and develop an encompassing conceptual overview of human need. It will be argued that need represents a pivotally important idea and, arguably, the single most important organising principle not only for social policy but in human history and for our understanding of humanity. It is pivotal in the sense that it connects an understanding of our interdependency as human beings with arguments about the claims that we can assert against each other. While it remains conceptually elusive, human need is the idea from which other eminently practical and strategic approaches can flow. Or, to put it more precisely, it is through contests over human need that social policy is made. The concluding argument will be essentially normative: the book will map out how we might prefer to think about human need. But along the way we shall be addressing a great many essential empirical questions: questions about what is going on in the world around us and how others accordingly frame their understandings of human need. It has long been acknowledged that ‘the concept of a need involves both “is” and “ought”’ (Thomson, 1987: 109).
It has been suggested already that the way we think about human need is relevant to the ways in which social policies are organised. Functionalist accounts suggest that the analysis of human need ‘provides a clear basis for the analysis of society. And though