Titmuss, Richard Morris (1907–1973)

Abstract

Best known as a standard-bearer for the postwar welfare state in Britain, Richard Titmuss was a constant critic of what he saw as the narrow and inhumane doctrines of conventional economics and economists. He reserved particular disdain for those who would have it that the social relationships between individuals which sprang up as a consequence of market exchange were ‘natural’, desirable, and the very pre-requisites of freedom: ‘as freedoms are lost in the marketplace … truth is an accompanying victim’ (1971, p. 240). Inasmuch as Titmuss envisaged individuals as constituent parts of a larger moral community, he carried forward into the postwar world a familiar strand of British social thought which had its origins in the 19th century. But in doing so he changed it in many quite fundamental ways. Marx had omitted any attempt to formulate a morality for a new society (Titmuss 1971, p. 195), so there was little to be mined from that source. And if only because the postwar world offered new options, Titmuss’s vision of the role of social policy in shaping a better community was of neither a reformist, a democratic socialist, nor an old Tory kind. Towards the end of his life, in his well-known book The Gift Relationship (1971), he attempted to marry it with a kind of Durkheimian conception of social policy as an instrument of social solidarity and moral regulation.

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 1st edition, 1987. Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman