T. H. Marshall on the Middle Ground

Abstract

T. H. Marshall was a highly intelligent and original thinker who first taught history at Trinity College, Cambridge, then immersed himself in the study of social theory and social institutions for three decades at the London School of Economics, and ultimately made, almost entirely between his retirement from the School in 1956 at the age of 62 and his death on 29 November 1981 in his 88th year, a unique and important contribution to the theory of the middle ground. Every student knows his influential text Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (first published in 1965 and now in its fourth edition), an exemplary attempt to explain welfare not only in terms of the wider society that surrounds the dependent, but in terms of the historical evolution of that society as well. Every theorist has studied the two Alfred Marshall lectures which he gave in Cambridge in February 1949 (and which were published as Citizenship and Social Class a year later) in which he enthusiastically associated himself with Alfred Marshall’s objective of substituting for the divisiveness of the Two Nations a common culture in which ‘every man is a gentleman’. Every literate person interested in the mixed economy, social policy, social philosophy or the political economy of social democracy must read The Right to Welfare. These books demonstrate how much the British approach to the theory of the middle ground owes, as to Tawney, Titmuss and Crosland, to the intellectual stimulus of T. H. Marshall.