Abstract
Chris Renwick’s book opens pretty much where you might expect: with William Beveridge at the centre of discussions of welfare reform in the Second World War, in this instance listening to the House of Commons debate on his famous report. But Renwick has taken his readers to this point in history with a wider motive: to show them what Beveridge did after this debate, which was to give a talk called ‘Eugenic Aspects of Children’s Allowances’ (p. 2). The purpose is not to discomfit readers (at least not primarily), but to make clear that the origins of the welfare state go far deeper than Beveridge’s report, important though it was, and can be found in the intellectual currents that swirled in political and intellectual circles throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Eugenics was just one of a number of ‘scientific’ approaches discussed as thinkers attempted to solve social problems in this period. Social surveys, ideas of free trade, disease, actuarial calculations, and debates about morality and human nature were all integral to the emergence of welfare thinking in this period.
The book is a history of how reformers attempt to gain a mastery of the elements that made up the social condition of the people. This means that while key familiar landmarks are visited on the journey (such as the Speenhamland system, the reforms of 1834, the ‘People’s Budget’, and the means test), there is not a huge amount of time given over to excavating these topics. Instead, they are smartly summarized and used as an opportunity to understand the intellectual currents that underpin them. For example, the introduction of the new system of National Insurance in 1912 leads to a wider discussion of welfare economics, and a lucid account of the thought of figures like Jevons and Pigou. This is no idle tangent, as Renwick illustrates that the concept of the ‘national minimum’ emerged from these thinkers and played a foundational part in later welfare thinking. Likewise, the discussion of the intellectual currents underpinning ‘New Liberalism’ include not just thoughts about poverty, but a reasonably lengthy discussion of Galton and the Eugenics Society. More than this, the attractions of Japanese culture for intellectuals is also noted. As Renwick points out, Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905) ‘imagined a world with a ruling elite drawn from across society and known as “samurai”’ (p. 108).
By the time we return to Beveridge and the even more familiar ground of the Second World War, the popular acclaim for his report, and the polices of the postwar Labour Government, the impression that the Social Insurance and Allied Sciences report had drawn on long established currents of social thought is entrenched. But Renwick conveys its complex findings with clarity and power: the section on the underlying ‘assumptions’ of Beveridge, and their importance in shaping the postwar welfare landscape, is an impressive piece of writing. He also deals nicely with the contest over the report and its implementation, not just in terms of standard Tory grumpiness and obstruction from doctors, but the concerns of the Left and the intellectual exchanges of Keynes and Hayek. For this specialist in post-1945 history, it would have been nice to have had a touch on how Beveridge’s stance on voluntarism and contribution was watered down by Labour in favour of a more universalist approach. Other readers may have their own pet ideas and thoughts that they may wish to see covered in more depth. This, I suppose, is the curse of the broader approach.
The book’s lack of footnotes may irate the purist, and its narrative style and relatively brief treatment of 150 years of history certainly prevents individual topics being discussed in great depth. There is a useful essay on sources which points to key readings, although doubtless not all of the author’s intellectual debts can be acknowledged in this way. Moreover, there are a few occasions when brevity feels like an enemy, such as the mention of Ireland in the chapter on the First World War and the discussion of the franchise in the same place. Far more importantly, though, this book is an engaging work of persuasive history. It is no mean feat to bring together the intellectual strands of 150 years of hard thinking into issues such as poverty, health and education. The book successfully does this, highlighting that later reformers built on the understanding of the new, and that yesterday’s contentious ideas and can be tomorrow’s broad consensus. Perhaps most of all, no one reading this book will be left unaware of what was at stake in welfare reform, or how tied it was to ideas of the nation itself.