Evils Social Problemengs

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The study examines the ollowing periods:

Edwardian Britain (190110): the oundation o the Rowntree charitable trusts in 1904

coincided with international economic recession. Enquiries into the impact o widespreadpoverty prompted re orming legislation such as the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act.

First World War and mass unemployment (191430s): there were great geographical

disparities in poverty and prosperity, but primary poverty was reduced. Liberal capitalismwas seen as the source o all social evils.

Planning and post-war reconstruction (late 1930searly 1960s): a new generation o social

scientists played a major role in ounding the British wel are state. Social studies o theperiod give con icting views o contentment and unease among British people.

Sea changes o the later twentieth century (1960s90s): income-support policies were

increasingly targeted to relieve social need, and the sexual revolution and rise o immigration brought major social changes. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher ushered in an era o rapid modernisation and ree-market capitalism.

The diseases o prosperity in the twenty-frst century: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

public consultation o 2007 revealed unanimously pessimistic concern about social issues,despite real incomes rising by 70 per cent.

Comparative historical perspectives and conclusions:Britain has been through social crisis at least twice during the last century but su ered less thanelsewhere, largely due to the strength o its local communities. Recently, however, communitystrength has been lost as the social security system has evolved to target individual rather thancollective needs. Contemporary studies conclude that social evils can arise as a negative result o increased prosperity. They support the original Rowntree philosophy in suggesting that socialevils have a moral as well as a material dimension.

Social evils, such as hunger and destitution, were fatalisticallyviewed by the Victorians as unavoidable. Joseph Rowntrees morepositive philosophy promoted social research and interventionto transform social evils into less malign social problems thatcould be cured. However, some of the evils that were therebyeradicated have subsequently reappeared. This study examinessocial problems and changing perceptions of them since 1904.

June 2009

www.socialevils.org.uk

Social evils and socialproblems in Britain, 19042008


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Introduction :defning social evils

What is meant by a social evil and how does it

di er rom the more amiliar and less dramaticconcept o a social problem? A workingdefnition might be that a social problem suggests an undesirable state o a airs thatpeople believe to be curable and or which theyare hoping to fnd, or believe they have ound, apractical cure. A social evil, by contrast,suggests something more complex, menacingand indefnable and may imply a degree o scepticism, realism or despair about whetherany remedy can be ound, other than ones thateither make matters worse or require a radicaltrans ormation o human nature. In everydayspeech both terms are o ten used rhetoricallyand interchangeably, with little hint o any moreprecise meaning. At a deeper and moretechnical level, however, the language o socialproblems may be seen as linked to the Anglo-French positivist tradition, endorsed over thepast century by many prominent British socialinvestigators and social re ormers. The languageo social evils is more di fcult to pin downprecisely, but is more o ten used by people roma variety o traditions radical and conservative,secular and theological who see bothindividual and social action as in some senseshaped and constrained by moral, natural ortranscendental laws. 1

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Social responsibilitiesQuestions also arise about the very meaning o the term social. For much o the nineteenthcentury, social responsibilities in Britain werevery largely thought o as civic, voluntary orassociational ties, to be discharged either bythe local poor rate, by individual and organised

charity or by one o the innumerable sel -governing riendly societies that insuredmembers against sickness, old age and death(bodies that in the last quarter o the nineteenthcentury probably embraced, however minimally,as many as two-thirds o the British lowerclasses). It was only in the early twentiethcentury that, or a variety o reasons (relating not

just to scale but to enhanced consciousness o nationhood), both social evils and theresponsibility or dealing with them cameincreasingly to be identifed as national. In thefrst decade o the twenty-frst century, thatperspective has shi ted yet again, as socialrelations, social obligations and indeed themysterious entity o society itsel areincreasingly re-conceived as cross-national andeven global in scope.

A urther complication arises rom the act thatsome perceived social evils o the present timewere seen in the past as quintessentially privateconcerns (even when viewed with moralopprobrium). Thus addiction to opium (casuallysmoked by Sherlock Holmes), supplyingcocaine (purchased over the counter byEdwardian ladies o ashion) and the physicalchastisement o children (a routine adjunct o parenthood down to the present day) werescarcely viewed as social o ences at all, letalone as potentially criminal ones, be ore theearly to mid decades o the twentieth century.

Victorian attitudes and Joseph Rowntreesphilosophy Since evil is intangible and social language isuid and ast-changing, the above defnitionsare necessarily somewhat arbitrary.Nevertheless, they capture certain distinctionsthat would have been only too amiliar to manyanalysts o British society throughout the

Victorian age. Most nineteenth-century

economists, or example, believed that artifcialstrategies to counteract unemployment,however morally well intentioned, wouldinevitably exacerbate the social evil they weretrying to prevent. Many Victorian re ormers eltthe same about hunger and destitution it wasa moral duty to assist the victims o these

conditions, but unthinkable to expect such evilsever to go away. Such tragic paradoxes weresimilarly portrayed in much nineteenth-centuryimaginative literature. Charles Dickens, inparticular, dramatically highlighted a long serieso appalling social evils, ranging rom death bystarvation, child cruelty and paedophilia,through to sexual exploitation, compulsivegambling and environmental flth. But thoughliterary writers helped to highlight such evils,they very rarely pointed towards realisticsolutions, other than (as in Dickens own case)calling or greater personal generosity and theso tening or conversion o individual humanhearts.

Such attitudes provide both a backcloth and aclue to the philosophy o Joseph Rowntree andthe ounding o his three great charitable trustsin 1904. As a largely sel -made Quakerchocolate manu acturer, Rowntree himsel re ected many o these Victorian belie s. He ullyendorsed public scepticism about treatingsocial diseases by applying worse remedies(a charge levied in the 1890s against theDarkest England policies o General WilliamBooth, ounder o the Salvation Army), but healso shared the commitment o Booth and otherpopular philanthropists to a moral, spiritual andpersonal element in promoting social re orm.

There was, however, a distinctive third elementin Joseph Rowntrees approach. This was hisbelie in the possibility o trans orming certainmenacing but ill-defned social evils into clearlydefned and measurable social problems, bysubjecting them to systematic social research.Such an outlook and motivation were implicit inthe thinking behind the third o his majorcharitable oundations, the Joseph RowntreeMemorial Trust (one o the very ew bodies inBritain during the 1900s that gave fnancialsponsorship to any kind o ormal scientifc

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inquiry into matters outside the spheres o chemistry, physics and biology). 2

Social research and the interventionistapproachOne o the long-term results o this new,research-based approach to social questions

was a gradual shi t o public attitudes away romthe earlier atalism towards a much more ar-reaching and interventionist conception o whathad ormerly been seen as ineradicable socialills. Over the course o the twentieth centurymany dire social conditions that earliergenerations had atalistically accepted asunavoidable acts o li e were either eliminatedcompletely or gradually trans erred to thedomain o remedial social policies. Malnutrition,mass unemployment and the treatment o manyatal diseases may all be seen as conditions thatunderwent this redefning process.Nevertheless, the lurking notion o a set o amorphous but intractable social evils, lyingbeyond the reach o constructive intervention,never entirely went away. Instead, it ebbed andowed at di erent moments and periods overthe course o the twentieth century, with theidentity o what constituted the most serious o such evils varying at di erent times. And, morerecently, something akin to the ill-defned butwidely pervasive sense o unease and socialdisintegration that had pervaded late Victorianand early Edwardian times has conspicuouslyresur aced during the present decade. Suchconcerns were dramatically mirrored inresponses to the Joseph RowntreeFoundations public consultation exercise,launched through the internet in the summer o 2007, and similar views have ound widespreadexpression in many parts o the mass media.

Resurgence o social malaiseBoth the causes and content o such surges o collective anxiety remain, however, to someextent conjectural, and deserve closerinterrogation than they usually receive. Thepresent paper will aim brie y to trace the historyo such concerns over the course o thetwentieth century and to pose some questionsabout the social realities behind such

oscillations o confdence and unease. How ardid the periodic resurgence o such anxietiesaccurately re ect objective material andstructural conditions? Or should they rather beseen as indices o more indefnable actors,such as changing moral, religious, behaviouraland gender norms, over a century when Britain

(like many other countries) was grappling withcontinuous and o ten pain ul adaptation toadvanced modernity? To what extent havesuch moments o malaise been not just socio-economic in character but also political andmoral indicating a breakdown o confdence ingoverning institutions, in the moral character o individual citizens and in social trust? (ONeill,2002) Why have some social di fculties thatwere believed to have been solved, orconsigned to history, re-emerged in morerecent decades and been conceived onceagain as social evils (on a par perhaps withanxieties about certain ormerly curablediseases that now appear resistant toantibiotics)? More conjecturally, how ar has thewidespread Victorian belie that certain kindso social remedies simply generate worseevils reacquired some degree o credibility inthe complex and ast-changing circumstanceso the early twenty-frst century? Some attentionshould also be given to how ar these cycles o moral anxiety were peculiarly British concerns,or whether (as is arguably the case today) theymirrored similar and parallel concerns in othercultures and countries.

Shi ts in perception o social evils To ully address all these questions wouldrequire much more detailed treatment than ispossible here, particularly as publicunderstanding o what constituted social evilsat any one moment was o ten ar romconsensual. The aim here is to draw a sketch-plan o some o the major shi ts in perception o social evils in Britain (including their partial, orin some cases wholesale, redefnition asmanageable social problems) over the pasthundred years. One o the re erence pointsused is the extensive research o JosephRowntrees youngest son, Seebohm Rowntree,who eventually succeeded his ather as

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chairman o the chocolate frm, but alsopursued a parallel career as Britains mostprominent empirical social scientist throughoutthe frst hal o the twentieth century. SeebohmRowntrees own research agenda almostcertainly helped to defne his athers goals inounding the Rowntree Trust, but his work as a

social scientist also a ords a particularly use ulpoint o entry into the question under review.Like his ather be ore him, Seebohm harboureda li elong interest in the moral, cultural andspiritual aspects o social and economicrelations, together with an equally strongcommitment to developing a value- ree socialscience (the latter to be pursued even where itsfndings clashed with his own moralpreconceptions). 3 Moreover, though his primaryinterest lay in analysing di erent kinds o poverty, the range o Rowntrees inquiries wasmuch more multilayered than this theme mightsuggest. It encompassed much o what he sawas the attitudinal and communitarian strengthsand weaknesses, as well as the more materialattributes, o the periods he was investigating.

And, because his surveys successivelyencompassed the late Victorian and Edwardianeras, the interwar years, the Second World Warand the rise o the wel are state, it is possible totreat them, although not actually in allible, as asignifcant thread in the evidence or changingsocial attitudes and values in Britain rom the1890s through to the 1960s. Moreover,Rowntrees fndings, both quantitative andinterpretative, are still the subject o ongoingcritical debate among social scientists today.His researches there ore o er an importantbenchmark rom which to contrast earlierperceptions o social evils with those o thepresent day.

Edwardian Britain: poverty anddegeneration

The oundation o the Rowntree trusts in 1904coincided with an unusual moment o acutemalaise and uncertainty in British social history,as was clearly hinted at by the oundationdocument in which Joseph set out his socialphilosophy. This malaise was closely linked to a

prolonged national fscal crisis, to the a ter-e ects o the expensive and unpopular BoerWar (18991902) and to international economicrecession (all bringing in their wake widespreadunemployment and the frst shrinkage inaverage real incomes in Britain or more thanhal a century). Dealing with these issues was to

have ar-reaching and long-term implications orthe wider structure o politics and government inBritain. But a more immediate result was toconcentrate attention on a range o social conditions, long known about in a ratherdesultory way, that now sprang to publicattention, not just as matters o philanthropicconcern but as active dangers to the overallhealth o the wider body politic. The centraltheme o this wave o concern was not justmass poverty, but much more speculativelyand sensationally the possible link betweensuch poverty and the spectre o socialbreakdown, economic ailure and nationaldecline.

Surveys re ect poverty The prevalence o mass poverty in Britain hadbeen identifed during the 1890s, frst by socialresearcher Charles Booths monumental surveyo li e and labour in London, and then, moreprecisely and scientifcally, by SeebohmRowntrees 1899 survey o York. These twostudies had together concluded that between aquarter and a third o the inhabitants o Britainwere living in poverty, a condition that bothauthors diagnosed as harm ul not just toindividuals but to the e fciency and well-beingo the whole o society. Both had suggestedthat at least part o this poverty was caused byalcohol, with around 20 per cent o averageworking-class household incomes being spenton drink. 4 Rowntrees study, which was the frstto be based on a precise estimate o incomenecessary or basic physical e fciency, alsosuggested that even i all poor people were topractise the most rigorous abstinence andrugality (as many o them did) then 10 percent o the population in the worlds richestnation still had incomes below the levelnecessary or physical health. (The dieta ordable by an unskilled labourer in York, or

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example, was lower by over 1,000 calories aday than the medically approved diet o aninmate in a workhouse or prison.) Both studiesalso concluded that the direst poverty washeavily concentrated among amilies with youngchildren and among old people living alone.

Poverty as a danger to physical health andnational security

These fndings had caused something o a stirwhen they frst appeared, particularly intemperance circles. But it was not until 1904,with the publication o a War O fce inquiry intonational Physical Deterioration, that povertyand its attendant social ills were suddenlycatapulted into the public arena as a pressingdanger to both military security and the nationsphysical health. This happened because thePhysical Deterioration inquiry reported that up to60 per cent o recruits to the British army duringthe recent war had proved physically unft ormilitary service. It portrayed this unftness aslinked to a vast interlocking network o secondary conditions such as malnutrition,overcrowding, low wages, chronic under-employment, contaminated milk supplies,tuberculosis, parental inadequacy, workingmothers, mental defciency and venerealdisease all o which ell largely outside thescope o any existing system o public healthinspection or social support. And perhaps mostshocking o all was the disclosure that one-sixtho in ants born in Britain at the start o thetwentieth century were dying be ore the age o one year. It was these bleak fndings, comingnot rom the post-Victorian bleeding heartsbrigade but rom the very heartland o themilitary establishment, that precipitated adecade o intense public enquiry into theterri ying and all-encompassing spectre o social evils. The underlying theme o thisconcern was not mere poverty (in itsel nothingnew), but the much more menacing spectre o poverty as a key determinant o physical, socialand cultural degeneration.

Between 1904 and 1914 there were to be noless than eight royal commissions o enquiry inBritain, which together with hundreds o lesser

enquiries, o fcial, academic and philanthropic,investigated these issues. Such bodiesaddressed what were seen in many quarters asthe most shocking and threatening aspects o contemporary social change, such as thesupposed proli eration o the mentally andphysically unft, problems o eugenic and

environmental decline, escalating rates o in antmortality and child cruelty, a chaotic andirregular labour market and a concurrent rise invagrancy, alcoholism and sexually-transmitteddiseases. Most important among them was theRoyal Commission on the Poor Laws o 19059, which launched the most comprehensivereview o social, health and environmentalconditions ever undertaken in Britain a reviewthat embraced not just clients o the Poor Law,but the great mass o the nations workingpopulation (two groups whom much late-

Victorian thought had erroneously imagined tobe largely distinct). Many o these enquiriesplayed a seminal role, not just in voicing bothpopular and expert understanding o contemporary social evils, but in proposingremedies. The report on Physical Deterioration,or example, precipitated major changes inpublic policy on the health, physique, diet andphysical and moral wel are o children. Theproceedings o the Poor Law Commissionlikewise generated the climate o public opinionthat was to lead to the break-up o the PoorLaw system and its eventual replacement by themuch more comprehensive services o thewel are state. Seminal legislation o the laterEdwardian period, such as the 1908 Old AgePensions Act and the 1911 National Insurance

Act, gave promise o addressing with dignity theproblems o honourable poverty andunpredictable interruptions o earnings. Thedecade also brought rapid expansion in theemployment o health visitors, midwives andsocial workers, together with majordevelopments in the voluntary sector, such asthe Scout and Guide movements, the Territorial

Army and the setting up o Social ServiceCouncils in cities throughout Britain.

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Confdence in re ormMoreover, closely relevant to the theme o thispaper, was the act that despite muchsensationalist news reporting the overallimpact o Edwardian public enquiries ultimatelyturned out to be cautiously optimistic,reassuring and anti-alarmist in tone. With certain

notable exceptions (mainly in relation to mentaldefciency), very little credence was given byserious investigators to panic-stricken earsabout hereditary degeneration, breakdown o social and amily structures, a hidden army o unemployables and other symptoms o national decay. Indeed ar rom suggestingthat nothing can be done the attitude o many Edwardian experts in these areassuggested, i anything, a degree o over-confdence about the long-term prospects orprogressive social, economic, industrial andenvironmentalist re orm. 5 The upturn in realwages rom 1905, the introduction o schoolmilk and meals in 19067, the payment o thefrst old-age pensions in 1910 and, above all, thesteep decline in in ant mortality that set in overthe Edwardian decade, all helped to de ect andde use some o the oppressive sense o socialmal unction and breakdown that had lurked inmany quarters o public li e during the a termatho the Boer War.

First World War and massunemployment

Both the pessimistic and optimistic strands insocial thought down to 1914 were overtaken bythe ar more pressing and apocalyptic anxietiesthat arose rom the Great War o 191418,which brought in its wake such diverse trendsas escalating ood prices, rationing, massmilitary recruitment and conscription,unprecedented absorption o women into thelabour market and the en orced break-up o many great aristocratic estates. Not all pre-warconcerns were eliminated overnight, and indeedsome were temporarily intensifed, as troopmovements and mass disturbance o the civilianpopulation made certain social evils muchmore visible to the respectable classes thanever be ore. Thus, though overall alcohol

consumption almost halved during the war,public ears o the racial poison o alcoholgrew, i anything, even more voci erous (Smith,1918). And, similarly, popular anxieties aboutthe moral and biological menace o workingmothers were intensifed as young women wereincreasingly dra ted into actories making

munitions. Nevertheless, such evils paled intoinsignifcance in ace o the experiences o thesix million young men who aced battlefelds,U-boats, maiming, shell-shock and violent death(all putting anxieties about domestic socialevils into a more muted and secondaryperspective).

External economic restraints and industrialissues

The eventual a termath o the First World Warsaw a great resurgence o anxiety about socialconditions in Britain, but this was to take a verydi erent orm rom that o the Edwardiandecade. A striking eature o social debate in the1920s, and indeed throughout the interwaryears, was to be its much greater subordinationto external economic constraints than had beenthe case be ore 1914. Great Britain was nolonger the worlds predominant fnancial power,its basic heavy industries were threatened byworld over-production, and concrete problemso restructuring the economy took precedencein the minds o many over the challenge o moreamorphous social evils. Many policy exper tswho had been prominent in pioneering re ormmovements be ore 1914 now either becamemuch more cautious in outlook, or wereincreasingly attracted to the more ambitioussocial experiments that appeared to be takingplace in post-1917 Russia. Moreover, theenormous increase in trade-union membershipthat took place during and a ter the war meantthat the ocus o debate on social issues shi tedaway rom the degenerationist concerns o theEdwardian era towards much more industrialand class-con ict-ridden issues, such aswages, strikes, lockouts, workplace conditionsand above all mass unemployment. 6

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Shi t in geographical distribution ohardship and reduction in primary poverty

The ull signifcance o these changes cannot beully detailed here, but one important aspectwas that not just the content but thegeographical distribution o the most pressingsocial questions changed markedly rom the

pre-war years. An unexpected trend, onlypartially understood or even identifed at thetime, was that the 1920s and 1930s proved tobe a period o rising real wages andunprecedented material prosperity or workingpeople in some regions and occupations, whilebringing prolonged misery, poverty andredundancy, even to highly-skilled workers, inothers. Another change, as Seebohm Rowntreenoted in 1936, was that opportunities orworking-class domestic consumerism andleisure had greatly increased since 1899 (againunderlining the enormous disparity betweendi erent geographical regions). A urtherchange was that, even in severely depressedareas, many o the social services and income-support schemes initiated in the 1900s took o during the interwar period, with the result that despite prolonged battles over job losses, wagecuts and beneft rates the worst indices o sheer physical privation were never quite so direas they had been in 1904. Thus, three o themajor poverty enquiries o the period LlewellynSmiths London survey o 192932, SeebohmRowntrees second York survey o 1936 and thePilgrim Trust enquiry o 1938 all ound povertystill heavily concentrated among lone olderpeople and amilies with young children. Butthey also ound that, despite the shrinkage o many major industries, the proportion living inprimary poverty was hal what it had been ageneration be ore. 7 And the surveys alsosuggest that a tacit sense o what would laterbe called relative deprivation i.e. o povertynot as absolute want, nor even as induced bydrink, but as exclusion rom the normal cultureo wider society had begun to penetrate themeaning o the term by the mid-1930s.

Suspicions o government ailure toimplement rational solutionsHow ar did such changes a ect the dichotomybetween social evils and social problemsidentifed above? On one level the notion o adire social evil as something tragicallybeyond the scope o remedial human action

exactly ftted the case o mass unemployment inthis period. Certainly there were many public-spirited people in interwar Britain who could seeno way o creating jobs or the unemployedwithout diverting investment away rom otherparts o the economy, thus merely intensi yingoverall recession. And the act that, when suchpolicies were adopted in other countries theywere o ten accompanied by authoritariandictatorships, seemed simply to confrm theatalistic viewpoint that nothing can be done.

The hunger marches o the early 1930sseemed to many people both those living indepressed northern towns and those in morea uent regions through which the marcherspassed to epitomise the notion o a socialevil in the ace o which governments, expertsand ordinary people elt hopeless and helpless.In more radical discourse o the period,however, the ocus was quite di erent, withcritics rom both le t and right claiming that, not

just on unemployment but on many otherissues, governments and vested interests wereailing to implement rational solutions to socialproblems, the nature and causes o which wereper ectly well known.

This suspicion in itsel pointed to another aspecto the social evils question that appearedsubtly di erent in the interwar years rom theEdwardian decade, which was the emergenceo a much wider spectrum o contested politicaland philosophical convictions about the verynature o social and economic li e. This wasparticularly so in the early and mid-1930s a terthe onset o the Great Depression, but be oreull realisation had dawned about the charactero Nazism (and, much later, o Stalinism). Duringthis period, and in some cases long a terwards,signifcant numbers o normally constitutionalistpoliticians and social activists dabbled with thepossibility o curing mass unemployment by

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extra-parliamentary direct action or use o emergency powers (Cripps, 1933). In thisperspective liberal capitalism itsel came to beseen as the source and summation o all socialevils, ar outweighing such merely secondarysymptoms as mass unemployment or poverty.

Planning and post-war reconstructionDespite the attraction o many theorists to moreextreme solutions, the later 1930s brought amajor resurgence o empirical research intosocial questions, including the possibility o what many saw as a hal way house lyingsomewhere between liberal constitutionalismand more authoritarian politics, in the orm o social and economic planning. The planningmovement included some who continued toavour revolutionary goals, but it also attracted anew generation o young social scientists whowere usually on the le t in politics, but whosepractical ideas owed much less to Marxismthan to the positivist tradition o the Frenchsocial re ormers Henri de Saint-Simon and

Auguste Comte. 8 These planners had manydi erent policy interests the economy, theenvironment, housing, education, incomeredistribution, national health but a key themebinding them together was a unanimousconfdence in the uture o applied socialscience. For this generation there were noimponderable social evils (other than thoseartifcially ostered by laisser- aire liberalism orascism); instead there was a wide range o practical social problems urgently waiting to beclearly defned, investigated and solved.

The Second World War, socialscientists and the ounding o thewel are state

Such attitudes came to a head with theoutbreak o the Second World War, andparticularly a ter 1940, when Britains desperatemilitary plight appeared to overturn allconventional ideas about limits to collectiveaction. And, simultaneously, the impact o bombing and mass evacuation opened the eyes

o many politicians, planners and ordinarycitizens to the modern variant o thegeographical two nations that had beeninvisibly developing over the interwar years. 9 Despite much talk o national solidarity, the initialreaction o respectable Britain to the conditiono slum-dwelling evacuees was no less

moralistic than in ormer times the di erencebeing that patriotic citizens now had to swallowtheir horror and do something about it. Suchdevelopments brought to the ore anunprecedented degree o in uence or theexpert social scientist. Seebohm Rowntreesrecommendations on child poverty, based onhis 1936 survey, were incorporated intogovernment plans or wartime amily allowancesas early as the autumn o 1939 (though thesurvey itsel was not published until 1941). 10

The next six years were to see a continuousstream o public enquiries into both immediatewartime problems and planning or post-warreconstruction, in which social scientists o allkinds economists, statisticians,demographers, housing and town planners,nutrition experts and social psychologists were to play a seminal role. The mostcelebrated o these was the Beveridge Reporto 1942, which recommended the fnal abolitiono the Poor Law, and its replacement byuniversal subsistence-level national insurance,universal amily allowances, a comprehensivenational health service and the permanentelimination o all but rictional unemployment bya system o centralised economic planning. TheBeveridge Plan is o ten seen as the oundingdocument not just o the British wel are state,but o similar developments throughout Europeand much o the British Commonwealth. Fromthe vantage point o this paper, however, it wasalso signifcant or a quite di erent reason. Thiswas that, having been at the cutting edge o re ormist movements during the Edwardian era,Beveridge like many other liberal intellectualsover the interwar years had or a time beenoverwhelmed by the prevailing pessimism o nothing can be done (in other words, thatmass unemployment was a social evil thatsimply could not be cured by normal

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democratic means). In the early 1940s, bycontrast, he moved towards an oppositeextreme, at times hinting that even a largelycommunistic style o social planning need notbe irreconcilable with maintaining personalliberties in a democratic state. Moreover,Beveridge was in no sense untypical in this

respect. On the contrary, many writings onpost-war reconstruction conveyed a very similarmessage. This could be seen most explicitly inthe wartime town-planning movement wheretraditional values o privacy, reedom, consumerchoice and amily li e were all portrayed asper ectly compatible with a centrally-plannedand pre abricated urban environment,collectively owned by the community anddirected by the social planner.

Strength o amily and community li e recorded in 1940s and 1950s

For better or worse, chronic defcit in nationalfnances a ter the Second World War preventedmany o these ambitious wartime visions o holistic planning rom being ully acted upon,with priority being given instead to more long-standing concerns about health, ullemployment and abolition o poverty. Theimmediate post-war period was one o prolonged economic hardship or a majority o people in Britain, with ood queues, rationingquotas, housing and black-marketeering beingeven more severe than in wartime.Nevertheless, sociological studies o the later1940s reported on the continuing, indeedrenewed, strength o amily and community li e,as women returned rom actories into thehome, as parents and children took their frstholidays together or nearly a decade, and asworking men enjoyed greater job security,higher real wages and more enhanced socialstatus than at any previous period o Englishhistory. In ant mortality (still seen, as in the1900s, as the crucial litmus test o social well-being) had allen dramatically since 1939. Andpublic opinion surveys likewise suggested thatmost people in post-war Britain were extremelyhappy with the new social services. Maintainingull employment became an absolute priority o

post-war economic policy, while the NationalHealth Service, ounded in 1948, instantlycommanded well-nigh universal supportthroughout the British population (despite, orpossibly because o , the act that its early yearswere spent struggling with a vast backlog o several generations o untreated ill-health).

Seebohm Rowntrees fnal York survey,published in 1951, suggested that primarypoverty had all but vanished in post-war Britain,its only serious incidence occurring among aew elderly people living alone in decrepitdwellings that were too big or them (theiraloneness arising rom the act that theiramilies had been rehoused on new estates o ten being more o a problem than quantitativeshort all o income). 11 At a more subjective level,many people continued to be apprehensiveabout all kinds o incalculable evils, but thesewere much more closely linked to the a termatho war, the implications o the atomic bomb andthe rise o the Soviet Union than to the moreexplicitly social evils o earlier in the century.

Reinterpretation o a modest golden ageDespite the omnipresent dread o nuclear war,much o this modest post-war contentmentappeared to survive throughout the 1950s.Indeed some contemporary commentatorssuggested that Britain was living through amodest golden age, marked by ullemployment, rising living standards, greatlyenhanced social equality and close-knit amilyand community li e. Such indicators werecoupled with some o the lowest levels o crime,delinquency, drunkenness, public disorder andmarital breakdown ever registered in Britishhistory. Even divorce, which had risen sharply in1945, reverted to a level only slightly above thato earlier decades, while per-capitaconsumption o alcohol ell in the mid-1950s toits lowest point on record. Despite the collapseo the old Victorian riendly societies (nowrendered redundant by wel are-state provision),voluntary and associational li e appeared toourish, with charities, churches, chapels, youthmovements, sports clubs and special interestgroups all booming in numbers. Latercommentators, however, were to reinterpret the

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1950s in a much more pessimistic light. Criticson the right drew attention to the periods lowgrowth rates, mounting in ation, bad industrialrelations, chronic budgetary defcits and a ataldecline in Britains international competitiveness.Critics on the le t emphasised the persistence o class divisions and de erence, an unhealthy

clinging to outworn visions o empire, and theemergence o new and disturbing symptoms o social pathology, such as juvenile delinquency,Rachmanism (exploitation o tenants byunscrupulous landlords) and widespreadprejudice against immigrants rom the newcommonwealth.

Better o but less happy in the1950s and early 1960s

How ar was either the optimism o earlieraccounts or the pessimism o later onesre ected in the subjective perceptions o peopleactually living at the time? The 1950s and early1960s was a classic age o sociological surveysinto what real people thought about real issues,so it is not di fcult to track down eelings o bothcontentment and unease, o ten expressedsimultaneously by the same people. Suchevidence suggested that Britain was seen as amuch airer society than in previous times, butthat, despite the uni ying impact o the stillrecent war, the 1930s perception o Britain astwo nations had by no means whollydisappeared. It suggested also that, even inmore a uent areas, there were eelings o strongly elt loss as well as gain attached to thematerial benefts o post-war reconstruction.Indeed, a recurrent theme o social enquiries o the period was that, though many peopleperceived themselves as better o than in thepast, they nevertheless elt less happy. Thereasons given or this were o ten vague orcon used, but some at least were linked to theside e ects o recent government policies o which respondents acknowledged themselvesto be the (o ten grate ul) benefciaries. Inparticular, higher living standards, betterhousing and wider educational opportunitieswere o ten seen as being achieved at theexpense o close contact with amilies and

communities and by loss o ormer culturalidentities that had not been replaced, or onlyvery partially so, by new ones. O course, weused to go to church, was a recurrent responseo young women and men who may or may nothave had an active religious identity in theirprevious communities, but had certainly not

ound it in their new ones.

Rise o private a uence at the price opublic squalor

Despite the solidarity o amily li e there werecertain premonitions o uture disturbance in thissphere, as women who had initially returned tothe labour market simply to urnish their homeswith consumer goods, started to fnd o ten totheir own surprise that paid employment wasmore rewarding and enjoyable than housework.Many men o the 1950s disliked any suggestionthat they should undertake domestic tasks, buta large minority who actively wanted to share inparenting and home-building ound these goalso ten in con ict with the demands o overtime,unsocial hours and the need to earn extramoney. In a rather di erent sphere, the sense o aloneness, noted almost casually by Rowntreein 1951, a decade later had become awidespread phenomenon, among not just oldpeople but young mothers and single people o both sexes who (even when desperatelywanting to do so) ound it di fcult to discovercontexts in which to meet neighbours or fndriends. Another signifcant fnding, largelyexpressed by the middle-aged but by no meansconfned to the middle classes, was a quiteunexpected hankering or something calledpre-war. Indeed, an important but neglectedaspect o the period was that despite almostuniversal gratitude or the wel are state otherservices o a non-wel are kind (such as buses,trains, town halls, community centres, municipaldance halls and general dealings witho fcialdom) were o ten elt to be greatly in eriorto those o the pre-war years. This seemed toecho the claim made by the Americaneconomist J. K. Galbraith about 1950s America,that the hallmark o the epoch was notcommunal prosperity but the rise o private

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a uence at the price o public squalor. Manysuch concerns were relatively trivial (or at leastweakly elt) by comparison with the muchdeeper anxieties o the 1900s or 1930s, butthey may perhaps be seen as presaging certainaspects o the much more intense sense o unease and social dislocation that was to

resur ace later in the century.

Sea changes o the later twentiethcentury

A central ocus o this paper so ar has been onways in which certain social evils, long seen bythe lay public as menacing but inescapableacts o li e, came to be translated by socialinvestigators into clearly defned socialproblems, which in turn became the basis o remedial social policies. This had been animportant eature o the culture o public li e inBritain (par tly, though not wholly, transcendingclass and ideological divisions) throughout theearlier twentieth century. The 1960s brought anumber o undamental changes in this process,that subtly trans ormed ways in which socialevils were conceived and understood. Onesuch change was that the increasingpro essionalisation o social work, planning andthe social sciences meant that there was anincreasing divergence between social evils asperceived by policy experts and thoseencountered by citizens in the street (adivergence particularly apparent in suchcomplex and con ict-ridden areas o policy asurban redevelopment and the treatment o problem amilies, drug addiction and thementally ill).

Social changes and opposing ideologies Another important trend was that rom the early1960s onwards (in marked contrast to mostother major European economies), income-support policies in Britain gradually shi ted awayrom the post-war universalist model o contributory insurance and reverted back to themeans-tested system inherited rom the PoorLaw. This meant that social benefts wereincreasingly targeted not on wider contractualentitlement, but on selective relie o social

need (a shi t that severely disadvantaged theskilled and regular working classes bycomparison with more marginal groups). Thistrend coincided with a much more dramatic andconspicuous development in the shape o anemerging revolution in sexual, interpersonal andgender norms, which was to trans orm social

attitudes in Britain over many subsequentdecades and (in sharp contrast with the era o the Victorian Poor Law) was to penetrate deeplyinto relations between child-bearing,parenthood and co-habitation on the one handand the system o state wel are on the other.

The arrival in Britain o large numbers o immigrants rom a great diversity o culturalbackgrounds, whose amily structures rangedrom the ultra-conservative to the ultra post-modern, likewise pro oundly challenged long-established British social perceptions andnorms. And, perhaps more undamentally, thelater 1960s and 1970s were to bring about atidal erosion in the support o many Britishpeople (o ten in direct opposition to their statedideological values) or the public-service/ wel are-state/mixed-economy model o government and society that had prevailed inBritain since the end o the Second World War.

As the pound lost its value, as industrialrelations worsened, as oil prices tripled and asBritish staple industries collapsed in the ace o oreign competition, power ul ideologies on bothle t and right increasingly challenged themodest consensual idealism o the post-warera. Such critics called on the one side or amuch more egalitarian, collectivised workersstate, based on a undamental and irreversibleshi t in the balance o power and wealth, andon the other side or the reeing up o capitalismrom state control and the de using o industrialstri e, not by benevolent state paternalism butby monetary stringency and the discipline o the market.

Industrial relations and Thatcherism These issues were to be ought out in a longseries o industrial battles over the course o the1970s, and there can be little doubt that tomany Britons o all political persuasions at thattime the key social evils o the epoch were not

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moral or wel are issues (nor even rising crimerates or immigration) but the mutually rein orcingpressures o in ation and bad industrialrelations. These battles culminated in the 19789 winter o discontent, when power stationsclosed down, rubbish rotted in the streets, deadbodies remained unburied, li e-saving

operations were cancelled and rats were seenin public hospitals or the frst time since the late

Victorian era. The result was the election o 1979, which brought to power a governmentand prime minister committed not just toreduction o government and restoration o markets, but to a undamental re-conceptualisation o what many peopleunderstood by the term social. For Margaret

Thatcher, a devout disciple o the liberaleconomist and philosopher F. A. Hayek,society was not a disembodied orce or entityin its own right, but simply the sum o autonomous human individuals (together withnatural units such as the amily) and theirmultiple interactions. Post-war public ownershipo the commanding heights o the economywas now dismissed as a thinly veiled orm o protectionism, while economic inequality, arrom being a prime social evil (as many post-war Britons had come to believe), was seen asthe indispensable motor o e fciency and higheroutput. In such a vision social wel are servicesand protection against poverty were by nomeans deemed unnecessary, but in stark contrast to the universalist aspirations o thepost-war era they were seen as needing to betargeted on a diminishing minority, who orvarious personal reasons would be unable toshare in the overall maximisation o wealth.

Such ideas were to uel government social andeconomic programmes in Britain over the nextthree decades, with New Labour a ter 1997honouring Mrs Thatcher with the sincerest ormo attery. They were never imposed with theout-and-out thoroughness that many neo-liberaltheorists had hoped or, but nevertheless theytrans ormed many aspects o British economicand social relations to an extent that would havebeen unimaginable in the post-war years (whenit had been assumed by many thinkers right

across the political spectrum that the era o ree-market capitalism had gone orever).Nevertheless, despite generating deep andsometimes violent disturbances (such as theBrixton and Toxteth riots o 1981 and theMiners Strike o 19845), they clearly struck adeep chord in British society, as witnessed by

the act that Margaret Thatcher won threegeneral elections, and her successor won aourth. Some Thatcherite policies were, initiallyat least, widely popular, particularly the sale o council houses to sitting tenants, the restraintson in ation and the curbs on wild-cat strikes.

The ull impact o Thatcherism on the valuesand structures o British society in the latertwentieth century still awaits serious historicalassessment (with many books written about theperiod being mani estly polemical and partisan).Nevertheless, since many voices within therecent surge o concern about social evilsdirectly invoked and blamed certain Thatcheritethemes, it is worth trying to pinpoint moreprecisely some aspects o what that impactactually was.

Modernisation, globalisation andconsumerismOne consequence o Thatcherism (andsubsequently o Blairism) was that many trendswhich had been slowly evolving over theprevious quarter o a century now racedorward with unprecedented speed. Thus thecommodifcation o public services, the shi trom a social insurance to a means-testedsystem o wel are and the castration o thepowers o local government had all beengestating under the regimes o Macmillan,Wilson and Heath, but the sheer pace and scaleo such developments under Thatcher had thee ect o trans orming them rom changes o degree to changes in kind. At the same timemany aspects o British local and nationalculture appeared to become ar less cohesiveand distinctive than in any earlier period o history. This was not just because o modernisation, but because the closure ororeign takeover o many major industries, theree movement o labour and capital acrossinternational boundaries, the disappearance o

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ancient provincial centres under car parks andshopping malls and the globalisation o bankingand fnance were not simply economic variablesbut orces that radically trans ormed the ways inwhich people thought and lived and even, tosome degree, who they actually were. Thusskilled and semi-skilled industrial workers who

in 1951 had made up 70 per cent o the adultmale employed population in Britain, by the endo the twentieth century were to be a mere 15per cent, their successors having movedupwards into pro essions, sideways intomarketing and retail or downwards into theranks o the long-term sick and unemployed.Such a change, or better or worse, inevitablyentailed major changes in social relations and inthe character o popular culture, not leastbecause such workers had played such animportant role in the raternal, voluntarist,sporting and communitarian culture o Britainearlier in the century. Their trans ormation intoconsumers, whose main leisure activity (a terwatching television) was shopping, couldscarcely ail to have a ar-reaching impact bothon personal relations and on wider British li eand national culture.

The diseases o prosperity in thetwenty-frst century

Social theorists and moralists throughouthuman history, rom Aristotle and the prophetso the Old Testament, through to fgures likeJohn Ruskin, R. H. Tawney, and MahatmaGhandhi in more modern times, have warnedagainst the dangers o a uence andacquisitiveness or their own sake rather thanor meeting basic human needs or or publicand communal purposes. Many moderneconomists have treated such warnings withsome disdain, as trying to smuggle subjectiveethical and spiritual concerns into value- reesocial science (a criticism requently levied bymarket economists against the economics o wel are school that inspired some o theounders o the wel are state). Ironically,however, the triumph o market principles inpublic policy over the Thatcher years was to beaccompanied by a marked resurgence o

interest in such normative questions amongmainstream academic economists (includingamong their number not just the sentimental or

journalistic second eleven, but some o theworlds greatest practitioners o the discipline,such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen). Theseparating out o the concepts o wealth,

wel are and well-being as inter-related, butnevertheless distinct, ways o describing humansatis actions has increasingly fgured in recenteconomics literature, together with attempts tomeasure subjective as well as objectiveindicators o these conditions. Likewise,qualitative as well as quantitative notions o consumption have crept back into thediscussion o such concepts (in conscious echoo John Ruskins once- amous maxim, there isno wealth but li e).

Unhappy a uenceRecent research by both economists andeconomic historians into such questions in theUSA, Britain and elsewhere has produced somesurprising and suggestive empirical results. Oneun surprising point (indeed wholly predictablerom a Hayekian/Thatcherite perspective) is thatinequality appears to have been universallymore e fcient than equality in generating alevel o economic growth that initially makespossible a system o redistributive socialwel are o any kind. Nevertheless, recent casestudies have suggested that this ceases to betrue whenever a certain level o prosperity isreached and wherever private a uence hasbecome a strategic device or keeping aneconomy going, rather than a means o satis ying real human needs. Furthermore,mounting evidence has suggested thata uence tends positively to undermine thepleasures o consumption and to generatenumerous secondary disorders, such asboredom, obesity, addiction, antisocialbehaviour and even marriage breakdown (all o which add greatly to the overhead costs o keeping a society going). It also tends tosubvert normal rationality and prudence, andabove all singularly ails in the utilitarian objectiveo making people happy. Thus, cross-nationalstudies o subjective well-being (a concept

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derived rom the pioneering early studies o Seebohm Rowntree) have ound that such anentity varies widely across di erent countriesand cultures, with only minimal re erence tolevels o income. No signifcant improvement in

subjective well-being appears to have occurred,or example, in such prosperous economies as

Japan, France and the USA since shortly a terthe end o the Second World War.

Pursuit o consumption creates newsocial evilsSuch fndings seem directly relevant to thehistory o the ebb and ow o anxieties aboutsocial evils, and in particular to the constructiono such evils in Britain at the present time. TheJoseph Rowntree Foundations publicconsultation exercise in the summer o 2007occurred at the high peak o an unprecedentedinvestment and housing boom, and at the endo a quarter-century o market-orientedeconomic management by both Conservativeand Labour governments in Britain. Over thecourse o that period real incomes in Britain hadrisen by nearly 70 per cent, in ation hadreached a historic low and standard rates o income tax had allen by a third. And, thoughpublic services had stagnated in the Thatcheryears, since 1997 government spending onhealth services, education and various orms o income support (including, in particular, thetargeting o poverty among young children) hadvirtually doubled. How, then, did it come aboutthat respondents to the 2007 JRF consultationvoiced unanimously pessimistic concern aboutsuch issues as social, communal and amilybreakdown, an epidemic o drug and alcoholabuse, persistent and worsening poverty andinequality, widespread crime, violence and childcruelty, and unsettled and ill-defnedapprehensions about race and immigration? (Allthis, o course, more than a year be ore thesudden precipitate collapse o the worldsnational economies into cataclysmic recession.)Orthodox economic theorists o a very shortgeneration ago might well have suggested thatthe JRF respondents were simply smuggling innon-economic ethical concerns and that allsuch problems would solve themselves, i only

meddlesome politicians would leave them to bedealt with by the discipline o the market. Thenew international economics o a uence andwell-being, however, points towards a ratherdi erent conclusion. It suggests that pursuit o consumption as an end in itsel , regardless o the value o the objects consumed, or o

prudent calculation o uture needs, may in actbe a power ul generator o personal misery,ailure o rational sel -discipline, social pathologyand economic disorder and decline. Suchre ections throw a highly suggestive light,historical as well as theoretical, upon thegenesis and character o social evils in thecultural and economic context o the earlytwenty-frst century.

Some comparative historicalperspectives

As indicated above, a historical perspective is ause ul reminder that anxieties about social evilsare by no means unique to the present time. Itsuggests that a comparable sense o moralcrisis gripped the public imagination in Britain atleast twice during the last century the frstoccurring in the a termath o the Boer War (incircumstances very comparable to the presenttime), the second generated during the interwaryears by mass unemployment. In both cases,these crises were eventually transcended. Butthis did not happen without a great deal o intellectual e ort, serious research and socialcontroversy and con ict (including, some wouldargue, the undamental reshaping o economicand social relations in Britain that stemmed romthe impact o two world wars).

Little has been said so ar, however, about thecomparative and international dimension o such crises, either in the past or at the presenttime. Such an enormous subject can only betouched upon brie y here. But a ew examplesmay give some indication o how ar anxietyabout social evils should be seen as part o thewider experience o modernity (and morerecently post-modernity), or merely asevidence o circumstances and attitudespeculiar to Great Britain. Cross-national

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evidence or the 1900s suggests that theperception o social crisis in Edwardian Britain,though intensely elt by many at the time, was inact quite mild and minimal by comparison withsimilar apprehensions in many otherindustrialising countries. In France and Italy inparticular, studies on social questions during the

n-de-sicle epoch were ar more deeplyobsessed with visions o a dangerousunderclass, o hereditary biologicaldegeneration and o imminent socialbreakdown than was ever the case in turn-o -the-century Britain. And, despite the torrent o anxiety about the condition o darkest Englandand outcast London, many measurablesymptoms o social pathology, such as crime,illegitimacy, prostitution and suicide, were verymuch more muted in Britain than on thecontinent o Europe. (Indeed, the Americansociologist Abraham Flexner describedEdwardian London as being like a great open-air cathedral by comparison with the squalor,misery, violence and immorality o Paris, Viennaand Berlin.) Commentators in the United Statesduring the 1900s likewise remarked upon theboredom, rootlessness, alienation andestrangement experienced by residents o great

American cities, to an extent unknown at thattime anywhere in Britain (though predicted bysome as the desolate uture or all modernsocieties). A generation later, Britain, as themost heavily industrialised country, su ered armore prolonged mass unemployment thanelsewhere in Europe, yet by comparison withmuch o the continent, British society remaineda haven o social integration and orderthroughout the interwar years. Moreover, both inthe 1900s and in the 1930s British socialrelations were glued together by very densenetworks o voluntary organisations religious,occupational, sporting, hobbies-based or simplysociable in character that, despite depressionand unemployment, were seen by many as thedistinctive essence and social cement o Britishnational culture (o ten compared, or example,with France o the Third Republic, where allsuch organisations were rowned upon, unlessspecifcally regulated and licensed by the state).

And in both decades Britain had by ar the

smallest pro essional police orces per head o population o any major Western country. Thevast majority o Britons, so one authority hadclaimed in 1912, had little need o policing inthe continental sense. Instead they largelypoliced themselves, either through their clubs,societies and other sel -governing organisations,

or through the inner discipline o the Anglo-Saxon conscience.

Loss o British community strengthsSocial indicators and other historical evidenceover the most recent decades, however, tell arather di erent story. They suggest not thatBritain had become more like other nations butthat some o the distinctively communitarianeatures o earlier British historic culture whichhad militated against many o the more diresocial evils earlier experienced on the continent may have declined or been irrevocably lost.

Thus, although the British people were stillextensive supporters o charities and voluntarymovements, by the end o the twentieth centurythis had become a predominantly passiveactivity, mainly involving payment o monetarysubscriptions to organisations run bypro essional und-raisers and managers. Sportlikewise, ormerly the vital epicentre o anationwide local associational li e (includingmass amateur games playing), had beentrans ormed into a largely commercial andspectator pastime a trend not helped by themass sale o school playing felds or the ban oncompetitive games by teachers unions (twopolicies in icted simultaneously on the nationsschoolchildren in the later 1980s). Similarly,although nearly 80 per cent o the population atthe start o the twenty-frst century claimed tohave some kind o religious belie , the corporateand associational aspects o religious practicehad steeply declined, trans orming Britain inoutward observance at least rom being oneo the most religious into one o the leastreligious cultures throughout Western Europe.

And, possibly as a consequence o waningreligious sanctions, the sel -regulating Anglo-Saxon conscience seemed also to be in steepdecline, a trend signalled in many quarters by awidely pervasive loss o the sense o mutual

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trust on which Britains lightly-regulatedinstitutions had so long relied. This took theorm on the one hand o a widespread loss o popular confdence in government agencies,public institutions and pro essional bodies, andon the other hand o a reciprocal lack o trust onthe part o government itsel , expressed through

the escalation o ever more detailed regulatorycodes or guiding the public and pro essionalconduct o citizens (a practice long amiliar inmany continental countries, but hitherto almostunheard o in traditionally sel -policing Britain).

In uence o social security system onpersonal and amily li eMoreover, by a strange paradox, the ever-increasing regulation o public and workplacebehaviour coincided with ever-increasinglibertarianism, diversity and instability in thesphere o personal relations. Suchdevelopments in personal li e-styles were o course common across the Western world, butthere were marked di erences in the ways inwhich they impacted on society. In the 1900s,and again in the 1950s and early 1960s, Britishsociety had had the lowest divorce rate, lowestlevels o recorded amily violence and lowestillegitimate birth rate throughout WesternEurope, but by the early twenty-frst century ithad moved close to the top o the comparativeleague table on all three counts. Moreover,although births o children to unmarried coupleswere rising rom the 1980s at a very similar ratein most o Western Europe, during the year2000 only in Britain did a majority o childrenborn outside ormal wedlock live on apermanent basis in one-parent rather than two-parent amilies. This was a pattern shaped inpart by the act that most continental socialsecurity systems paid generous universalamily allowances to all settled couples,whereas Britain since the 1960s had gonedown the (supposedly more economical) roado targeting benefts on lone mothersaccording to individual fnancial need. LikewiseBritain by the year 2000 had by ar the highestrates o teenage pregnancy in Europe, againre ecting the act that (as in the USA, wherelone motherhood was even more prevalent) the

structure o benefts and housing provisionprivileged single parenthood over the claims o married or permanently cohabiting couples.Such policies bore witness to an admirableconcern among British policy-makers o allparties or tackling problems o child poverty.But they may also suggest a lack o o fcial

imagination about possible ways o doing this,together with an almost perverse degree o tunnel vision or myopia about possibleinteraction between social securityarrangements and the long-term culturalevolution o personal li estyles, private choicesand structures o amily li e.

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Conclusion

The above narrative and analysis is necessarilyhighly selective, particularly in relation to recentdecades, where despite the vast proli erationo both national and international social andeconomic data the long-term historical

signifcance o changing attitudes, institutionsand patterns o human behaviour remains arrom clear. Nevertheless, certain tentativeconclusions and suggestions may be drawnrom this historical survey. One is the airlyobvious one, that concern about the menace o widely-perceived but only hal -understoodsocial evils is by no means unique to thepresent time, but has erupted or a variety o reasons at a number o earlier moments in bothBritish and European history. A second, lessreassuring, suggestion is that whereas in pastepochs, many aspects o the highly-integratedhistoric culture o Britain meant that Britishinstitutions and policy-makers were better ableto cope with such crises than their continentalneighbours, at the present time they may bemuch less so. A third point links together thespecifc concerns o respondents to the recentJRF consultation exercise with currentdevelopments in economic theory and wel arethought, about the nature and understanding o human happiness and human ourishing.

These studies have concluded that manyaspects o contemporary social evils appear tohave come about not just because somegroups in society have been excluded romrecent general prosperity (though there hascertainly been much o that), but because thevery nature o that prosperity has been incertain respects de ormed, corrosive o interpersonal and communal ties, evenpathological in its in uence on individual andcollective human behaviour.

A urther point is to suggest a closerreassessment o the social philosophies o bothJoseph and Seebohm Rowntree. Both thesemen were deeply committed to the view thatsocial ills might be moral and spiritual incharacter as well as measurable and material,but that nevertheless the techniques involved in

assessing these two dimensions should not becon used (a distinction that was implicit inJoseph Rowntrees oundation document o 1904). Seebohm Rowntrees poverty studieslikewise went to great lengths to separate outthe purely quantitative aspects o social needrom those associated with mis-spending and

disorderly li estyles, and his lesser-known work on Belgium similarly distinguished the materialprerequisites o prosperous communities romthe moral, cultural and spiritual ones. A resulthas been that, over the course o a hundredyears, Seebohm Rowntree has requently allenoul o criticism rom both approaches. Thus,humanitarians have accused him o aninhumanly Spartan defnition o primarypoverty while positivists have accused him o

just the opposite o smuggling in all kinds o subjective and culture-bound value judgementsabout desirable and undesirable personalbehaviour and patterns o human li e. Thecurrent debate, however, supports the claimthat these two approaches are complementary,since the very language o social evilsnecessarily includes an implicitly moral andimmaterial dimension. This conclusion is urtherrein orced by, and dovetails with, the critique o the intellectual bankruptcy o purely quantitativeaccounts o human ourishing, suggested byrecent empirical, historical and theoreticalwritings on the themes o wealth, wel are andwell-being.

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Notes1 A third term, social ills, which seems tohover between problems and evils, was o tenused in Rowntree publications and other socialre orm literature o the early 20th century.

2 The Ratan Tata Trust at the London School o

Economics, ounded in 1912 by an Indian ironand steel millionaire to carry out research intoproblems o poverty in Britain, was another rareexample. It is o some interest that Sir Ratan

Tata saw poverty in Britain as much more inneed o investigation at this time than in India.

3 On Joseph Rowntrees own earlierinvolvement in applied social research, seeWorstenholme (1986). On Seebohm Rowntreesthought and work, see Briggs (1961).

4 This calculation included the very largenumbers o working people who rarely or nevertouched alcohol, indicating that in somehouseholds the percentage o income spent ondrink was very much higher than 20 per cent.

5 The meaning o the term environmentalist atthat time was not green policies, but anti-Darwinian social policies that would improve thematerial environment o the poor, rather thanaccepting the notion o hereditary degeneration.

6 This is not to suggest that industrial problemshad not been prominent in the Edwardian era,but simply that they loomed much larger in the1920s and 1930s.

7 Rowntrees estimate o a 50 per centreduction in primary poverty has been criticisedin the light o the evidence collected by the NewSurvey o London Li e and Labour in 1931(Hatton and Bailey, 1998). A rather di erentproblem arises rom the act that Rowntree inhis second survey retrospectively adjusted hisestimate o primary poverty or 1899 rom 10per cent to 15.46 per cent o the population.

This was presumably done because Rowntreein 1936 had adopted a slightly more cultural andless austerely physiological defnition o basichuman needs. This redefnition to some extent

blurs the contrast between the fndings o thetwo surveys, but it rein orces the contrastbetween the degree o stark poverty that hadexisted in 1899 and the amount o improvementthat had taken place by 1936.

8 A urther important stimulus to planning was

the publication in 1936 o J. M. Keynes Theory o Employment, Interest and Money , a work thatseemed to overturn a central premise o Britisheconomic thought namely that artifcialinvestment to counteract unemployment wasalways counterproductive. The theoretical rootso Keynes ideas were in act very remote romthose o the positivists, but the crucial historicalpoint was that he appeared to have underminedthe view, which had paralysed thinking aboutproblems o unemployment or more than acentury, that nothing can be done.

9 The two nations was a phrase originallycoined in the 1840s by Benjamin Disraeli tocontrast the burgeoning industrial north o England with the depressed agricultural south,i.e. a very di erent pattern rom that which hademerged in the 1930s. The pattern discerned byDisraeli had not entirely vanished, however. A survey o 1940 ound the worst malnutrition inEngland among the children o arm labourers inrural Ox ordshire, where the local county councilhad resolutely re used to implement the schoolmeals and milk legislation o 19067.

10 Minutes o Economic Advisory Council,1939. Rowntrees proposal, which he had beendeveloping since 1899, was or universalsubsistence level amily allowances that wouldraise all amilies with children out o povertywithout raising wages a remedy stronglyopposed by trades unions. The adoption o thispolicy, which was pressed on a rather reluctantgovernment by J. M. Keynes, was motivated bythe imperative need to avoid wartime in ation.Rowntrees survey was not published until 1941,with the result that his in uence on theintroduction o amily allowances has o ten beenoverlooked.

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11 The over-optimism o Rowntrees 1951 reporthas been blamed or the disappearance o concern with poverty in Britain until the early1960s (Hatton and Bailey, 1999). But this seemsimplausible, partly because so prominent anauthority as Richard Titmuss was voci erouslydrawing attention to old-age poverty in the mid-

1950s, and partly because the poverty crisis o the 1960s ocused mainly on lone mothers, whoscarcely appeared in earlier poverty surveys.

Re erences Atkinson, A.B. (2008) The Changing Distributiono Earnings in OECD Countries . Ox ord: Ox ordUniversity Press.

Barclay, Peter (1995) Inquiry into Income and Wealth . York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Beveridge, W.H. (1942 ) Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge Report). London:HMSO

Booth, Charles , Li e and Labour o the People inLondon, 10 vols (L1892-7)

Briggs, Asa (1961) Social thought and social action: a study o the work o SeebohmRowntree, 1871-1954 . London: Longmans

Brown, C.G. (2006) Religion and society intwentieth-century Britain. London: Longman

Central Control Board (1919) Alcohol as a ood, a drug, a poison . London: National TemperanceLeague

Central Statistical O fce/O fce or NationalStatistics (1973-2003) Social Trends

Field, Frank (2002) Debating Pensions: Sel -Interest, Citizenship and the Common Good .London: Civitas

Flexner, Abraham (1914) Prostitution in Europe .Public bureau o social hygiene

Flora, P. (1983-87) State, economy and society in Western Europe 1815-1975, 2 vols. Frank urtand London: Campus Verlag and Macmillan

Flora, P. (1997) The State o Social Wel are . Ashgate

Freeman, Mark (2004) The Joseph RowntreeCharitable Trust: A study in Quaker philanthropy

and adult education. 1904-1965. York: JosephRowntree Charitable Trust

Galbraith, J.K. (1958) The A fuent Society .Boston, MA: Houghton Mi in

Garnett, Jane (2007) Rede ning ChristianBritain: post-1945 perspectives. London: SCMPress

Glennerster, H. (2004) One hundred years o poverty and policy. York: Joseph RowntreeFoundation

Harris, Jose (ed) (1997), William Beveridge: ABiography . Ox ord: Clarendon Press

Harris Jose (2003) Society and Civil Society inBritain, 1945-2001, in K. Burk (ed) The BritishIsles since 1945 . Ox ord: Ox ord UniversityPress

Hatton, T.J. and Bailey, R.E. (1998) Rowntrees Li e Cycle o Poverty in Inter-war London.Discussion Paper No 98. Colchester: Universityo Essex

Hatton, T.J. and Bailey R.E. (1999) SeebohmRowntree and the Post-War Poverty Puzzle .Discussion Paper 2147. Centre or EconomicPolicy Research

Keynes, J.M. (1940) How to Pay or the War .Macmillan

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AuthorPro essor Jose Harris, Faculty o History, and StCatherines College, University o Ox ord.

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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has started aUK-wide debate to fnd out what are the socialevils o the 21st century. This paper is part o aprogramme o work by key commentators onthe themes that emerged rom a publicconsultation. A book (Contemporary SocialEvils), published in June 2009, summarises the

fndings so ar, including new research withdisadvantaged groups, and looks orward to apost-recession uture.

See http://www.jr .org.uk/social-evils or morein ormation.

Published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, The Homestead,40 Water End, York YO30 6WP. This project is part o the JRFs research

and development programme. These fndings, however, are those o theauthors and not necessarily those o the Foundation. ISSN 0958-3084

Read more at www.jr .org.uk

Other formats available.Tel: 01904 615905 email: info @jrf.org.uk

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Evils Social Problemengs