It has been said in the United States that, “modern social welfare has really to be thought of as help given to the stranger, not to the person who by reason of personal bond commands it without asking” (Wilensky and Lebeaux, 1958, p 141). It has therefore to be formally organised, to be administered by strangers and to be paid for collectively by strangers.

Social welfare or the social services, operating though agencies, institutions and programmes outside the private market are becoming more difficult to define with precision in any society. As societies become more complex and specialised, so do systems of social welfare. Functionally, they reflect, and respond to, the larger social structure and its division of labour. This process makes it much harder to identify the causal agents of change, the microbes of social disorganisation and the viruses of impoverishment, and to make them responsible for the costs of ‘disservices’. Who should bear the social costs of the thalidomide babies, of urban blight, of smoke pollution, of the obsolescence of skills, of automation, of the impact of synthetic coffee (which will dispense with the need for coffee beans) on the peasants of Brazil? The private benefits are to some extent measurable and attributable, but the private losses are not. Neo-classical economics and the private market cannot make these allocations; they are not organised to estimate social disruption and are unable to provide adequately for the public needs created by social and economic change.

Our growing inability to identify and connect cause and effect in the world of social and technological change is one reason for the historical emergence of social welfare institutions in the West. Altruism by strangers for strangers was and is an attempt to fill a moral void created by applied science. The services and programmes developed in the West to give aid to the stranger have inevitably and necessarily become more specialised and complex.

The ‘social services’ in Britain are largely the product of the 20th century, a delayed response to the industrialism of the 19th century.