These two extracts, first published in 1959 and 1962, illustrate the ways in which Richard Titmuss engaged with central issues of structural social and economic change. He was concerned that the public social services – as he preferred to call ‘the welfare state’ – should not be studied out of context “as ‘things apart’; as phenomena of marginal interest, like looking out of the window on a train journey” (Titmuss, 1958, p 8). Both readings challenge the conventional wisdom of ‘the end of ideology’ discussed by John Hill in the Commentary to Part 3. The problem of poverty was seen as ended and inequality was being reduced – and by too much, in the view of many.

By the end of the 1950s in the United Kingdom, there was much invocation of what had become known as the ‘You’ve never had it so good’ society, the phrase coined from a comment by Prime Minister Macmillan in the run-up to the 1959 election, when the Conservatives retained power. The resulting policy climate was nicely caught by Richard Titmuss in his long introduction to the fifth edition of Tawney’s Equality in 1964: “We have had our passions; now we can leave to the sophisticated and the academic these matters of ‘nicely calculated less or more’. What remains is social engineering; a mixture of art and technique in the manipulation and ordering of an existing ‘good’ society” (Titmuss, 1964, p 14). These views he challenges in these two chapters (see also Part 3, Chapter Three, ‘Social welfare and the art of giving’).

In ‘The irresponsible society’, Titmuss opens with a challenge to “socialists … to re-define and re-state the inherent illogicalities and contradictions in the managerial capitalist system”, Titmuss explores the impact of “the changing concentrations of economic and financial power”. He takes the private insurance sector as a prime example “where combination and concentration may threaten the rights and liberties of the subject to choose the values and decide the social priorities that will shape the sort of society we live in” (p 14).

The power of pension funds and insurance companies and their “irresponsible decisions” were issues which Richard Titmuss was particularly well-equipped to understand from his own early work in insurance.