All collectively provided services are deliberately designed to meet certain socially recognised ‘needs’; they are manifestations, first, of society’s will to survive as an organic whole and, secondly of the expressed wish of all the people to assist the survival of some people. ‘Needs’ may therefore be thought of as ‘social’ and ‘individual’ … [but] … no complete division between the two is conceptually possible; the shading of one into the other changes with time over the life of all societies; it changes with time over the cycle of needs of the individual and the family; it depends on prevailing notions of what constitutes a ‘need’ and in what circumstances; and to what extent, if at all, such needs, when recognised, should be met in the interests of the individual and/or of society. (1955: 62)
It has been said that need is only one of several perspectives from which we might define what we mean by human welfare (Fitzpatrick, 2001: 5). However, the goals of social policy, if they are not directly informed as Titmuss asserts by concerns about human need, will indirectly reflect assumptions about human need. Governmental social policy and academic social policy are each preoccupied – more or less explicitly – with processes of resource distribution on the one hand and the development of human services on the other. Social policy interventions may entail the distribution or redistribution of resources through the administration of taxes and the provision of cash transfers; the provision of education and training and the regulation of employment; the regulation of land use and the environment and the control or provision of housing; the organisation of health and social care and social protection for people who are vulnerable.
The significance of needs
This kind of provision must be informed at some level by assumptions or principles relating to what human beings (as citizens, customers, subjects or clients) might need. However, there are other candidates for the job of prime organising principle, such as wants or preferences; desert and merits; security and social protection. The contention of this book is that, at root, these all amount to different interpretations of, or approaches to, need. Though philosophers may seek it (for example, Thomson, 1987) there cannot be one true meaning of a word like ‘need’. It is a word with a myriad of vernacular meanings.
Consider some of the things that you might say you will need in the course of your own life, or the needs that you consider yourself fortunate to have already met. The important things that might immediately spring to mind are the need for a job; for a place to live; for time to relax; for somebody to love. Our needs as human beings relate to such fundamentals as work, space, time and relationships. Everyday meanings of need might be thought of as falling – more or less – into four broad categories:
Economistic meanings. These are essentially market-oriented. Needs are associated with economic opportunities and consumer preferences. Our needs are reflected in the priorities we should be enabled freely to express in terms of the jobs, the homes, the leisure pursuits and personal relationships we might choose.
Moralistic meanings. These are essentially self-centred, yet authoritarian in nature. Needs are associated not so much with what we might want to have, but dictated by the things we have to do; with a necessitous struggle for jobs and homes and such allowable pleasures and relationships that fate and fortune permit.
Paternalistic meanings. These are essentially socially protectionist in orientation. Needs are associated with common vulnerabilities and what is required so as to preserve a shared social order. We need safe and suitable jobs, homes, recreation and supportive relations in order to take our proper place within society.
Socially reformist meanings. These may be socially liberal or social-democratic in orientation. Needs are associated with the requirements of a ‘progressive’ liberal society.1 We need decent jobs and homes and fulfilling pastimes and social relations in order effectively to participate in and contribute to society.
These suggested meanings are not necessarily systematic. They amount to no more than caricatures of broad, sometimes principled and often complex arguments as to the nature of the human condition. You are unlikely ever to meet anybody who subscribes consistently to just one of these meanings in the terms just portrayed. Our purpose for the moment is to provide not necessarily an accurate description of what particular individuals, commentators or policy makers think or say, so much as a clearer understanding of the complexity of the issues. In practice these meanings are seldom, if ever, applied in complete isolation from one another. They tend to be muddled together. Approaches are combined – often unthinkingly but sometimes with subtlety – in contradictory or complicated ways. This will be illustrated in the chapters that follow.
These meanings will be enlarged upon and explored, while introducing different radically humanist meanings of need. People in fact need more than just jobs. Certainly they need the means to obtain a livelihood, but this should not necessarily depend on wages. It is possible, in some parts of the world, to obtain livelihoods without recourse to a cash economy through subsistence farming; or, in others, to sustain oneself as a lone parent or informal carer through social security benefits. Nonetheless, people most certainly need to be meaningfully active in ‘work’ – regardless of whether it is paid – because this is part of what defines our humanity. ‘Work’ might entail labour, but it might also entail caring, studying, artistic endeavour or all kinds of purposeful and creative activity. And human creativity demands not just skills but also the development and expression of personality (in its literal sense).
People need more than just a place to live. Certainly they need to be appropriately sheltered from the elements, but space and place are important. People need comfortable homes and a healthy, sustainable environment. People need more than just time to relax. Certainly they need enough time to rest, but more particularly they need time to realise their own creativity; to play as well as rest. People most definitely need somebody to love, and somebody to love and care for them in return. Our humanity, it will be argued, depends on the manner of our interconnectedness and interdependency with others.
The absolute/relative distinction
A key debate that has driven a great deal of this complexity concerns a distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ conceptions of need. Is it possible to define what human beings need in absolute terms, or is human need always socially or culturally relative? And if human need is always relative, is there any point in seeking to define it? This has been a critical question for social policy (Doyal & Gough, 1991: Part I). The period of welfare state retrenchment that began in the global North from the 1970s onwards (M. Powell & Hewitt, 2002) has been associated by some writers with a ‘politicisation of need’ (Langan, 1998: 13–21). Towards the end of the last century arguments about the relativity of human need had developed to the point that the very concept of need had among many policy makers become increasingly discredited.
The absolute/relative distinction is intimately caught up with issues of poverty, deprivation and inequality. A person may be said to be absolutely poor if she is deprived of the necessities of life itself. She may be said to be relatively poor if she is deprived of whatever she might need in order to participate in the life of the society to which she belongs. Villagers in a drought-stricken region of sub-Saharan Africa need food and water. But do relatively deprived families living in inner-city public-sector housing developments in the global North really need state-of-the-art-televisions and high-end smartphones, simply because some, or perhaps many, of their neighbours seem to have them? As living standards rise around the world, will human needs continue indefinitely to expand? These are questions to which we shall be returning later in