Sociology, and the allied field of social policy, were latecomers to British universities. Their modern disciplinary identities were only established in the three decades after the Second World War, replacing the earlier, less methodologically prescriptive traditions of social enquiry that had flourished in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. This ascent to academic respectability also had a major impact on post-war public life. Technical experts on ‘society’ began to play a more celebrated role in public policy debates and cultural commentary. Amid the galaxy of outstanding British social scientists of the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Titmuss (1907-73) has a good claim to be the most influential.

Although eventually a beneficiary of the more technocratic and credentialed world of British higher education after the War, Titmuss had in fact left school without any qualifications at the age of 14 and spent the early years of his career working for an insurance company. But he was also a prodigious autodidact and accompanied his paid work with a growing side-line as a writer on social questions. His burgeoning reputation in this field led him to be commissioned to write the official history of the social services during the Second World War. The resulting book, Problems of Social Policy (1950), was well-received and it was on the strength of this work that he was appointed Professor of Social Administration at the LSE in 1950. From this platform Titmuss laid the foundations of the study of social policy as a separate academic field and produced numerous significant publications on key welfare issues, notably on the distribution of income and on healthcare. Titmuss's influence extended beyond academia to broader public debates in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s about social inequality. He was close to the Labour Party and was a respected informal advisor to senior Labour politicians. The 1964-70 Labour government drew extensively on policies that he and his associates – particularly Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith – had developed. Essays on ‘the Welfare State’ was published before that, in 1958, and collected together Titmuss's key articles and lectures from his first eight years at the LSE.