Part One: Evaluations and Extensions

Abstract

Social policy is concerned with social values and collectively defined needs. The consensus is at once the conservative consequence of past occurrences and the radical cause of future departures. Welfare policies vary with ideology in time and space rather than converging to equilibrium along a unique developmental trajectory. Privatisation would threaten the self-perpetuating community by legitimating the divisiveness of the Hobbesian bellum. Socialism would reinforce the bonds of belonging by putting in place integrative institutions which reaffirm the common and the shared. The social scientist, a social actor like his fellows, cannot afford to neglect the methodological importance of multidisciplinarity, understanding, a sensitivity to social purpose and an acceptance that there are limits beyond which the statistics will never go. What it all adds up to is this, that ‘social administration as a subject is not a messy conglomeration of the technical ad hoc’¹ but instead a focus for the ‘imaginative excitements of unifying perspectives and principles’.²