The crisis of modern society: Richard Titmuss and Emile Durkheim

Introduction

In 2014 David Garland offered a spirited defence, based on the sociology of Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), of the ‘welfare state’ as a ‘key concept in historical sociology’. It was a ‘fundamental aspect of modern government’ and hence, in Durkheimian terms, a ‘normal social fact’, both on empirical grounds – all advanced societies have some form of ‘welfare state’ – and on conceptual grounds – it is an ‘integral, functionally necessary, dimension of such societies’. Sociologically, then, it is, ‘as Durkheim put it, “bound up with the fundamental conditions of social life”’. Garland examines the ‘welfare state’ as a social and governmental, rather than political, phenomenon, while pointing to historical flaws in analyses portraying it as altruistic and/or social democratic. Nonetheless, arguments proposing its demise were ‘ideological chatter’, and ‘not to be taken seriously’. Another authority cited by Garland is Richard Titmuss (1907–73), ‘leading academic spokesman for Britain's post-war social policies’, who ‘regarded “the welfare state” as hostile phrase, used by social policy's enemies rather than its friends’. For Titmuss the expression carried ‘all the wrong connotations’, including the suggestion of an ‘overbearing, bureaucratic state’. Hence Titmuss's placing of inverted commas around the phrase, a practice followed below (Garland, 2014: 328–30, 357, 333; see also Garland, 2022: 136).

This article argues a close connection between Durkheim's social science, the framework for Garland's understanding of the ‘welfare state’, and that of Titmuss, unquestionably one of its early leading authorities and exponent of the new, post-1945, academic field of social policy. There were undoubted differences. Titmuss, for instance, directly experienced a modern ‘welfare state’, something denied Durkheim. As we shall see, they notably diverged over the role of intermediary bodies in modern society, partly because of the differing intellectual traditions in which they operated. More broadly, Durkheim fits more easily into histories of sociological theory. Not all social scientists, meanwhile, accept a Durkheimian influence on Titmuss, while some were hostile to what they saw as the latter's intrusion upon their territory (e.g. Fontaine, 2002; Douglas, 1971, scathing in her criticism of Titmuss's use of anthropology). And Titmuss's thought drew on already existing British traditions of social analysis and, post-1945, on hostility to analyses based on ‘the end of ideology’ (Stewart, 2020). Nonetheless, he fruitfully engaged with Durkheim's sociological methods and conclusions. In addition to his recent biography, contemporary social scientific writings, some directly cited by Titmuss, are utilized (Bellah, 1959; Ginsberg, 1937; Hayward, 1960; Merton, 1949, 1967; Stewart, 2020). The insights of individuals he inspired as young scholars before they proceeded to their own distinguished careers in social policy – Glennerster, Pinker, and Sinfield – are also noted. Most importantly, the work of both Titmuss and Durkheim is extensively cited.

We begin with a preliminary discussion of Titmuss's social science. An outline of Durkheim's key ideas, and their impact on British social science, follows. The Durkheim/Titmuss relationship is elaborated next, before the article's various strands are gathered together.

Titmuss's social science

During his career at the London School of Economics (LSE) Titmuss effectively created the independent field of social policy. Social policy was, and remains, particularly British and the only post-war social science not dominated by Americans, and Titmuss still features strongly in its citation indices (Hudson and Lunt, 2022; Powell, 2018). Titmuss's appointment as chair in social administration in 1950 provided a platform from which to establish his field through teaching, research, and contributions to policymaking. His activities were underpinned by an influential interpretation of the emergence of post-1945 welfare regimes. Titmuss effectively founded a social scientific approach to welfare history, one seeking to explain the ‘links connecting “modernization”, liberal democracy, and social provision’, and with a ‘pronounced presentist vision of the past’ (Vaudagna, 2018: 27–8). His preoccupations included modernity's costs and benefits; the corrosive effects of increasing inequality; challenging the power of new post-war elites; promoting social solidarity and altruism, especially through flexible welfare policy; and prioritizing social over economic growth.

For Titmuss, social policy was an eclectic field, and its primary subject, the ‘welfare state’, a phenomenon with ‘multiple meanings’ (Garland, 2022: 134). His social science consequently embraced a variety of academic disciplines, extracting evidence from multiple sources. This was reflected in the diverse approaches to which his department's students were exposed. In 1957 available options included not only social policy and social administration, but also medical sociology and the economics of social security, while students were directed towards other departments’ offerings, for instance anthropology and economic history. The reading list for Titmuss's course, ‘Introduction to Social Policy’, included texts on social service administration and on demography, and Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society (London School of Economics, 1957: 372ff).

Fifty years after his death, Titmuss still informs commentaries on social science and social obligation. We now look briefly at some of the most insightful of these, so providing a framework for closer analysis of the Durkheim/Titmuss relationship. The political philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that, in The Gift Relationship, Titmuss ‘presented a wealth of data’ showing that Britain's blood donation arrangements, based on voluntarism and altruism, were in all respects superior to those of the United States, dominated by the market. Titmuss further asserted ‘an ethical argument’ against any market in blood, as this undermined the ‘“gift relationship” as an active feature of social life’. He therefore attached ‘independent moral value to the generosity that motivates the gift’ (Sandel, 2013: 135–6). In 2019 Adrian Sinfield, social policy academic and campaigner, discussed the benefits fiscal and occupational welfare afforded their recipients while powerful voices decried state welfare for the disadvantaged. Titmuss had pointed this out some 60 years previously – Sinfield is referring to the influential The Social Division of Welfare – so challenging ‘the conventional wisdom that redistribution was confined to the welfare state’ (Sinfield, 2019: 136).

His approach's coherence has, though, been questioned. In the mid 1980s the American policy scholar Mike Miller, introducing a selection of Titmuss's writings, described these as emanating from ‘the premier philosopher and sociologist of the Welfare State’, and thereby ‘a major source of the reinvigoration of the philosophy of welfare’ (Miller, 1987: 16). It is not coincidental that Miller's commentary appeared in an era of welfare retrenchment (nor that Sandel and Sinfield wrote in a later ‘age of austerity’). But the claim to ‘philosophy’ is a strong one, and critiqued by Titmuss's biographer (Stewart, 2020: Chapter 30).

Ben Jackson partly addresses this issue. Titmuss did not always articulate his ‘theoretical substance explicitly or precisely’. Rather, he ‘presented his analysis as a criticism of “economics” as a discipline’, proposing that the ‘study of social policy as “sociology” offered a more authoritative analysis of the welfare state’ (Jackson, 2019: 160). Reviewing Stewart (2020), Jackson remarks that the influence of R. H. Tawney – socialist historian and Titmuss's friend, and later LSE colleague – is rightly noted, but also observes that ‘to this normative vision we might also add some further, more strictly social scientific commitments’ integral to ‘Titmuss's theory of welfare’. He endorsed a ‘vision of social investigation’ in some respects ‘straightforwardly positivist’, while coming to draw on ‘a social-psychological account of the profound pressures placed on individuals by modern societies’. Apparently influenced by Durkheim, Titmuss ‘also regarded modern capitalism as characterized by an ever-greater specialization in the division of labour, making individuals increasingly interdependent and vulnerable’. One feature of such societies was a life course involving ‘both competitive processes of meritocratic selection for social positions and long periods outside the labour market at the beginning and end of life’ – hence Titmuss's concerns about the costs of ‘failure’ in modern societies (Jackson, 2021: 137–8).

For Howard Glennerster, Titmuss did not produce a ‘tightly framed, fully developed academic theory’ for social policy. Nonetheless, he produced ‘a compelling framework of middle ground ideas’, which has further evolved since his death (Glennerster, 2014: 5, 10). In this light, the arguments of Robert Merton, the American sociologist admired by Titmuss, merit attention. Merton proposed that ‘theories of the middle range’ lay between ‘the minor but necessary working hypotheses’, abundantly produced during routine research, and comprehensive attempts to develop a unified theory explaining ‘all the observed uniformities of social behavior, social organization and social change’. For Merton, Durkheim's Suicide exemplified such a method (Merton, 1967[1949]: 39, 59). In his history of the LSE, Ralf Dahrendorf discussed the School's ‘tradition’ in social science methodology. One aspect of this was ‘Merton's influential concept of “theories of the middle range” forming, in practice, the ‘bread and butter of social science’ (Dahrendorf, 1995: 202). Titmuss became part of this ‘tradition’.

Robert Pinker, like Glennerster and Sinfield initially a junior LSE colleague of Titmuss, argued that his perception of social policy as holding ‘distinctive and superior moral purposes’ discouraged closer relationships with other social sciences. While ‘occasional excursions were made into sociology, anthropology, economics, and law’, these were generally undertaken ‘in the spirit of missionary visitations to heathen parts’. His allusion to ‘moral purposes’, though, highlights Titmuss's aspiration to advance beyond the descriptive. Tawney was a crucial influence. One of his most famous works, The Acquisitive Society, berated interwar capitalism's moral bankruptcy and inequalities, profoundly informing Titmuss's views. But Durkheim too was important in shaping his social thought. Titmuss extracted from Durkheim's sociology and Marcel Mauss's anthropology, Pinker observes, ‘certain theoretical perspectives and empirical findings’ apparently compatible with his own approach (Pinker, 2017: 100–1; on Titmuss and Tawney, see Stewart, 2020: Chapter 5).

David Reisman suggests that Titmuss had much in common with earlier social investigators such as Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree, all three belonging to a strand of British social policy reluctant to ‘separate description and prescription, induction and reform’. Titmuss's work, Reisman continues, was also influenced by sociology's ‘pioneers’. Like Durkheim, he saw society as ‘a reality in its own right’, while ‘social facts can only be explained through reference to other social facts’ and ‘collective rather than individual causes – and solutions – must be found for non-ego social problems’. Both Durkheim and Titmuss acknowledged the importance of individual sensibilities, recognizing that ‘a sense of resentment could develop where people are not given equal opportunities to fulfil their potential’, especially where there was a ‘forced division of labour’. Neither, though, promoted class conflict, nor recognized, in economic terms, ‘resources constraint’. Other correspondences included the mutually perceived threat from insufficient social integration, and advocacy of social aims shaped by more than just economic factors. Economic individualism was difficult to reconcile with ‘moral community’, although personal individualism should be ‘given an important role to play in the interest of progress’. There were institutional remedies to the problem of ‘normlessness’, in Titmuss's case most notably the National Health Service. He and Durkheim recommended ‘collective pressures to counteract the threat to the professional ethic from the market mechanism’, the latter being, of itself, unable to guarantee ‘acceptable standards’. Their main difference was over welfare provision, much of which Durkheim was happy to leave to intermediate groups, as, for example, in ‘establishing the general principles’ of labour contracts and industrial health. Titmuss had a ‘wider conception of social welfare’, believing it should be ‘macrosociological, aimed at the national community and provided by it’. It should thus be a social rather than a professional or occupational concern, hence his hostility to ‘any move towards corporate provision’ (Durkheim, 2019[1957]: 42; Reisman, 2001: 273–5).

Michael Freeden acknowledges that Titmuss was not a ‘professional political thinker’; nor did he produce a ‘general social theory of welfare’. Nonetheless, he articulated important ideas about modern society, for instance that if ‘civil society had become regulated by the state, it was not in order to destroy voluntarism and individualism: precisely the reverse’. Such regulation sought ‘to encourage and develop the private, or interpersonal, values of altruism and care’. Durkheim is thus identified as one of Titmuss's ‘intellectual heroes’, drawing on his stress on the division of labour as ‘a fundamental social attribute’ and on ‘the rise of professional groups with solidarities based on “likenesses in skills, function, and prestige”’. Titmuss likewise recognized that increased social dependence itself was a function of the growth of individualism (Freeden, 2003a: 286–8). Freeden further argues that Titmuss ‘linked altruism to social compensation for the vagaries of human misfortunes, certain only in their uncertainty’. Durkheim had advocated ‘the blend of mutually regulating centralised statism and decentralised associationism’ characteristic of French political culture and a route, like Titmuss, ‘between social fact and moral prescription’ proffering ‘a scientifically based social morality’. This appealed to French social reformers, before being drawn upon by ‘welfare theorists such as Titmuss’. Titmuss held a strong sense of liberty ‘inherited and modified from the new liberalism, with intimations of its strong social underpinnings in French welfarism’. He forcefully warned, though, about the ‘new authoritarianism that medical and welfare technologies could generate’, especially the professional solidarities ‘at the centre of Durkheim's social analyses [but which] required counter-measures’. In health care, a major Titmuss concern, both doctors and patients should have the right to act as ‘free agents’, notably through exercising choice. So not since ‘the New Liberals had health been so emphatically allied to an organic view of society that fostered democratic social integration’ (Freeden, 2003b: 17–19, 33, 42).

Taken together, these commentaries identify key aspects of Titmuss's social thought, including an organic view of society, a sense of moral purpose, and a flexible vision of social policy and the positive ends to which it could be put. We now briefly consider the historical contexts in which Durkheim and Titmuss operated.

Each belonged to that branch of modern European politics broadly described as ‘progressive’, a (sometimes uneasy) merger of social liberalism and non-Marxist socialism. Tony Judt demonstrated how Durkheim helped shape public debates in the French Third Republic while stressing the intellectual's obligation to remain independent of any particular political party (Judt, 1992: Chapter 13). William Logue proposes that Durkheim ‘rejected traditionalist conservatism, laissez-faire liberalism, and collectivist socialism’ in favour of ‘new liberalism’ aspiring to ‘combine adequate social integration with individual freedom’. Durkheim's sociology thus pursued a ‘science of society’ supportive of ‘liberal values’ and hence was ‘a sort of social medicine’ – the social scientist's concern with social pathology mirrored the physician's with individual pathology. Society itself was ‘both the empirical source and the moral foundation of individual liberty’, so ‘attempts to found a doctrine of liberty on the individual were … bound to fail’ (Logue, 1983: 151, 153, 162). Susan Stedman Jones observes that Durkheim rejected Marxism on various grounds, including its theoretical pretensions. Economic modernism brought, though, a greater ‘possibility of socialism’, for while the former caused ‘social suffering’, it generated movements protesting this as intolerable (Stedman Jones, 2001: 120, 124, 127). J. E. S. Hayward, drawing on his LSE doctoral thesis, demonstrated Durkheim's contribution to that strand of French sociopolitical thought designated ‘solidarism’ through his attempt to ‘orientate sociology … to fill the vacuum left by political economy in the scientific study of society’, to advance the state's ‘positive task’ of extending ‘personal liberty based upon social rights’, and to thereby ‘provide through social science a remedy for the social problems increasingly occupying French politicians’. In so doing, Durkheim helped shape France's subsequent welfare provision (Hayward, 1960: 21, 23–4, 31–2).

Titmuss was a committed political activist, as a Liberal in the 1930s and, post-war, through close involvement with Labour Party policymaking. Like Durkheim, he participated in public debate, to which both brought a social science perspective alongside a powerful awareness of historical change. Titmuss, too, rejected Marxism and class conflict, in 1960 dismissing ‘the doctrine of Victorian Marxism’ as inapplicable when analysing post-war capitalism's contradictions (Titmuss, 1960: 1). He argued for greater moral purpose in society, located individuals within broader historical trends and social structures, promoted individual rights while seeking to balance these with the state's obligations, and stressed society's organic interconnectedness. As a result, Titmuss's ideas owed, as did Durkheim's, much to ‘new liberalism’. Both were engaged political actors and thinkers, actively seeking to make a difference (Stewart, 2020). The next section further outlines Durkheim's key ideas, and their impact on British social science.

Durkheim: Ideas and impact

The aim here is not to deal comprehensively with a complex thinker (the starting point in English is Lukes, 1973; for a summary, see Lukes, 2001). Certain points are, however, crucial for our analysis. Durkheim's ‘lifelong intellectual concern’, Charles Marske suggests, was the ‘crisis of modern society’ arising from the transformation of ‘traditional society’ through ‘rationalism, industrialism, and individualism’. One consequence of modernity was that it ‘expands the role of the state while simultaneously increasing the level of individualism in society’. The individual's ‘progressive emancipation’ thus implied not a weakening, but, rather, a transformation in social ties. The individual was ‘not separated from society but joined to it in a new manner’ (Marske, 1987: 1, 3). Bryan Turner adds that Durkheim understood the ‘negative social consequences of unregulated markets’, notably ‘major social instability that he called “anomie”’ (Turner, 2019: viii). Here, both the state and law were crucial. For Durkheim, ‘the antagonism too often presented between legal authority and individual liberty’ was false. Individuals could ‘only be free to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority’; hence ‘only social rules can prevent abuses of power’ (Durkheim, 1933: 3). These broad points are now briefly expanded upon.

First, Durkheim was a leading theoretician of functionalism, sociology being nothing if not ‘the science of societies considered from the point of view of their organisation, functions, and future’ (Durkheim and Fauconnet, 1904: 268). Functionalism perceived society as ‘a complex organism’ whose constituent parts worked together to produce stability. Stability and order underpinned ‘moral consensus’, present when most members of society share the same values. Later figures central to the development of functionalism, which dominated sociology for much of the 20th century, were Talcott Parsons and his former student, Merton (Giddens and Sutton, 2021: 19–22). Jackson demonstrates that the concept of ‘function’ was introduced into British political thought by idealist philosophers, conceivably influenced by Comte and Durkheim. He then identifies ‘left functionalism’, developed by socialist thinkers such as Tawney, notably in The Acquisitive Society. Tawney's version of a ‘functional’ society embraced an ‘ethic of mutual service’ that could replace ‘financial gain as the main motivational driver of human activity’ (Jackson, 2003: 87, 89–90, 100; for a fuller discussion of ‘left functionalism’, see Jackson, 2007: Chapter 2). In his obituary of Tawney, Parsons claimed that his ‘general moral reference point was the Christian conception of a functional society’, wherein ‘each unit, particularly each individual person, should serve the common interest and the needs of other members’. The modern pursuit of self-interest had mixed outcomes, but one negative consequence was ‘a peculiarly objectionable level of inequality’. Tawney was, then, one of his generation's ‘most important figures’ in fostering ‘the climate of opinion in which an important part of contemporary sociology is working’. Crucially, as a critic of contemporary economic individualism, he ‘emphasized the need for something other than economics to understand it’ (Parsons, 1962). Titmuss's social science was informed by Durkheim's functionalism, not least as mediated by Tawney and his embrace of that mode of sociological analysis.

Second, Durkheim challenged the claims of the ‘free market’. The absence of ‘all economic discipline’, for example, inevitably extended ‘its effects beyond the economic world’, so weakening public morality (Durkheim, 1933: 4). Antonino Palumbo and Alan Scott suggest that Durkheim, like Max Weber, rejected classical political economy's argument ‘that markets are self-generating and self-reproducing’. Capitalism was ‘not merely a mode of production’ but also ‘a set of perceptions, beliefs and motivations: a “form of life” quite distinct from any other in human history’. It was thus, contrary to ‘classical’ economics, not ‘natural’. Durkheim rejected political economy's ‘economic reductionism’, proposing that the division of labour had a moral dimension ‘more important than its technical one and that it is a social fact’. Modern societies were sustained by the interdependence of their constituent individuals and groups ‘and by a common respect for the rights of the person’. This was ‘organic solidarity’ with functional divisions and institutional specialization ‘likened to bodies with specialised but interdependent organs’ (Palumbo and Scott, 2003: 369–70; original emphasis).

The ever-increasing division of labour, meanwhile, generated huge economic advances, but with ambiguous consequences, socially and individually. On the one hand, Stedman Jones argues, the ‘pathologies of modern society’ meant that individualism was not ‘adequately developed’ (Stedman Jones, 2001: 116). On the other, as Bellah put it, ‘Individual differences were not only tolerated but encouraged’ (Bellah, 1959: 454). Sandel notes that, for Durkheim, the division of labour could be a ‘source of social solidarity’, provided ‘everyone's contribution is remunerated according to its real value to the community’, a ‘functional’ position not unlike Tawney's. Durkheim did not envisage work ‘mainly as a means to the end of consumption’. Rather, it could be a ‘socially integrating activity, an arena of recognition, a way of honoring our obligation to contribute to the common good’ (Sandel, 2020: 211).

Modernity did not, then, simply entail emancipation from ‘the constraints of the ancien regime’. It was also ‘a destructive force’ potentially exposing the individual to loss of identity and society to ‘anarchy’. Anomie, manifested by the disruption of traditional society's social values and social integration in the form of mechanical solidarity, was modernity's chief pathology. Nonetheless, organic solidarity offered individuals the possibility of social reintegration. Durkheim endorsed a ‘constructivist ethical project for promoting organic solidarity’, with the state having a crucial, proactive, role to play. It was ‘the main historical agent’ initiating modernization and could not, pace Marx and the classical economists, ‘be reduced to the requirements of capitalism’. Equally, though, Durkheim advanced ‘a pluralist theory of the state that advocates a division of powers by means of social checks and balances’ on its authority (Palumbo and Scott, 2003: 371–81; original emphasis).

Third, Durkheim sought to clarify sociology's domain and, like Titmuss, to engage with other disciplines while avoiding their abstractions. Economists, for instance, were not concerned with ‘discovering what happened in the actual world’, nor why. Rather, they worked towards ‘combining purely formal ideas’ (Durkheim and Fauconnet, 1904: 262). Titmuss was later to echo such criticism in his career-long rejection of what he saw as lack of grounding in contemporary economic and sociological thinking. He and Durkheim, though, were more positive about history. Bellah argued that the latter's ‘concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity’ developed within an ‘essentially historical framework’, and that while his impact on sociology and anthropology was well understood, less so was his ‘profound influence on cultural history’ (Bellah, 1959: 449 and n. 14). Lukes likewise points to Durkheim's influence on the pioneering Annales school of French historians (Lukes, 2001: 3901). Shortly after Bellah's intervention, Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost was published. This groundbreaking work offered new pathways for social history through its engagement with, for example, historical demography. In a neat example of intellectual cross-fertilization, Titmuss, whom Laslett knew well, Durkheim, and Annales school historians were favourably cited (Laslett, 1965).

In 1898 Durkheim outlined history's centrality. It was one of the ‘special sciences’ necessary for sociological investigation and, once it had taken on the ‘character of a comparative discipline’, became ‘indistinguishable from sociology’. The following year, expanding on sociology's role, he claimed that it was still too often seen as ‘nothing but a purely philosophical discipline or metaphysic of the social sciences’. But his ‘chief objective’ was explicitly to refute ‘this conception and practice of sociology’ (Durkheim, 1960[1898–9]: 342–3, 347). Shortly afterwards, in a paper on the relationship between sociology, the social sciences, and philosophy, Durkheim raised further methodological and contextual issues. It was necessary to ‘arrest those perilous tendencies towards isolation – isolation of the social sciences one from another, and of general sociology from the mass of the social sciences’. Among sociology's existing ‘imperfections’, it lacked ‘a sufficiently wide and effective recognition of the interdependence of all social phenomena’. Consequently, ‘The unity of the social kingdom cannot hope to find an adequate expression in a few general and philosophical formulae detached from the facts and the detail of specialist research.’ The sociologist's work was ‘not that of the statesman’. Rather, it was sufficient ‘to indicate the general principles as they appear from the preceding facts’. Sociological enquiry implied ‘no metaphysical conception, no speculation about the fundamental nature of beings’. Sociologists must adopt the same mental approach ‘as the physicist, chemist, or physiologist’ when investigating ‘a still unexplored region of the scientific domain’. Here they will encounter ‘facts whose laws are as unsuspected as were those of life before the era of biology, discoveries that would be both surprising and disturbing’ (Durkheim, 1905: 198–200; 1964[1938]: xiv, 23).

Which returns us to ‘social facts’, the phenomena revealing the ‘true life of societies’ and the basis of scientific sociology (Durkheim and Fauconnet, 1904: 258). Social facts were, Durkheim confirmed in the second edition of The Rules of Sociological Method, ‘things’, a proposition that had proved controversial. Facts had, furthermore, no significance unless ‘grouped in terms of types and laws’. Consequently, ‘the sense of historical reality at its most concrete does not exclude the methodical research into similarities’, a precondition of any science (Durkheim, 1960[1898–9]: 344; 1964[1938]: xliii). As Lukes argues, the logic of studying social facts meant that they existed independently of individuals, and that ‘social and cultural factors’ influenced, and largely constituted, those individuals. A further implication was that Durkheim sought to identify factors specific to particular societies, and so ‘neither strictly personal features of individuals nor universal attributes of human nature’. There was, therefore, a clear distinction between the aims of sociology and those of psychology, between the social and the individual (Lukes, 1973: 9, 13–15).

What, then, of Durkheim's influence on Britain? Starting with the largely self-taught Titmuss, we have no direct knowledge of his first encounter with Durkheim. But from the 1930s onwards he read widely, was politically and intellectually active in the Liberal Party and the Eugenics Society, already influenced by Tawney, and, by the outbreak of the Second World War, known to LSE luminaries such as William Beveridge and Alexander Carr-Saunders, both prominent social scientists (Stewart, 2020: Chapters 3–5). Putting this in context, until the 1960s the social sciences were largely peripheral to British academic life. In the late 1940s only around 5% of university professors were social scientists, with the field's position little changed since the immediate pre-war period. Economics was the most established discipline, and sociology almost completely absent. The exception was the LSE, where sociology had gained a significant foothold. Its dominance was unique, and academic home to around one third of all university-based social scientists outside of economics (Savage, 2010: 120–1). It also employed one of the few non-sociologists sympathetic to the subject, Tawney.

‘Classical’ sociological theory came to Britain by various routes. Durkheim had an unquestionable impact, from the beginning of the 20th century, on British anthropology, and thence on social science more broadly. An important figure here was Bronislaw Malinowski, an intellectual leader at one of anthropology's strongholds, the LSE. As Philip Smith remarks, Malinowski became ‘an unwitting midwife for the later Durkheimian structural functionalist movement’, deeply embedded in British social science by mid-century (Smith, 2020: 115–16, 155). Another key development was the British Sociological Society's founding conference, held at the School in 1904. Durkheim's paper on the relationship between sociology, the social sciences, and philosophy, cited earlier, was read. The ensuing controversy was, for Durkheim, evidence that a ‘prevalent and unfortunate confusion between sociology and philosophy’ remained. But his ideas, including his denial that modern society was free from conflict and division, provoked ongoing debate (den Otter, 1996: 133–5, 142). Baudry Rocquin, meanwhile, identifies interwar cross-fertilization between French, and especially Durkheimian, sociology and British social science. His doctoral thesis, in particular, highlights the LSE's importance and the roles of Tawney and Malinowski in its intellectual development, and devotes a chapter to ‘British sociology and Durkheim’. Rocquin's argument is that previous scholars have underplayed this cross-fertilization (Rocquin, 2017, 2019). All this is important for three reasons: anthropology's impact on British sociology, and social science more generally; Durkheim's centrality to this development; and the intellectual atmosphere at the institution to which Titmuss was appointed in 1950, the LSE.

Titmuss and Durkheim: Adopting and qualifying

We now examine instances of Titmuss directly referencing Durkheim, or engaging with Durkheimian themes or concepts. In the late 1950s he criticized the eminent British jurist A. V. Dicey for neglecting ‘the influence on law-making opinion’ exerted by Marx, Alfred Marshall, and Durkheim (Titmuss, 1959: 302, n. 10). In his 1950 LSE inaugural lecture, ‘Social Administration in a Changing Society’, Titmuss highlighted what he deemed crucial to comprehending contemporary society, and to his field's future development. In groping ‘towards some scientific understanding of society’, uncertainty had to be acknowledged, for it ‘brings us closer to reality than is possible for those who have faith in the absolute or faith … in the pursuit of specialization’. Social administration embraced a wide subject matter, including ‘the moral values implicit in social action’. It was, though, confronted by new challenges, especially given the arrival of the ‘welfare state’. Improved social services, for example, had ‘stimulated the expansion of certain institutions and professional associations each with their own self-regarding interests’. Such specialization brought ‘social gains’, but also ‘other problems’. The latter included specialist bodies’ growing role in policy formation, accompanied by increasing resentment of external criticism. Furthermore, as ‘social services become more complex, more specialized and subject to a finer division of labour they become less intelligible to the lay councillor or public representative’. This gave ‘welfare professionals’, a phrase Titmuss was to employ extensively, yet more power. Titmuss likewise noted the contributions, in the historical development of the department he now led, of Tawney; L. T. Hobhouse, sociologist and central to British ‘new liberalism’; and another sociologist, T. H. Marshall, theorist of ‘social rights’ and instrumental in Titmuss's appointment (Titmuss, 1951: 183–5, 189–90, 193, 196). There was much going on here, and we return to this lecture at various points. And while there were no direct references to Durkheim, Durkheimian themes can be identified, including modernity's losses as well as its gains.

To explore the Durkheim/Titmuss dynamic further, we focus on three, overlapping, topics where the complementarities between the two are particularly evident: modernity and its impact; social science, moral purpose, and social change; and professional associations, the individual, and the family. First, then, Titmuss emphasized modernity's broad consequences, while equally acknowledging history's particularities. For example, ‘modern societies with a strongly rooted and relatively rigid class structure’ were resistant to ‘self-examination’. Hence, in the 20th century the ‘major stimulation to social inquest in Britain … has come from the experience of war’ (Titmuss, 1962: 188). This drew on Titmuss's participation in, and interpretation of, Britain's ‘Home Front’ during the Second World War, when, by his account, social solidarity characterized the civilian population's behaviour (see further Titmuss, 2018c[1958]). Durkheim, too, had been affected by war and its political and socio-economic consequences. France's defeat by Prussia in 1870 stimulated his interest in social science. It also led to the creation of the Third Republic, in whose affairs Durkheim was publicly active, notably by supporting Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of providing information to the German military (the ‘Dreyfus Affair’). This clearly breached his previous principle that social scientists should keep out of day-to-day politics (Lukes, 2001: 3898; Turner, 2019: xiv–xv). But it helps explain, too, given the Third Republic's post-war tensions and fragilities, Durkheim's claim that democracy had a ‘moral superiority’, based as it was on ‘reflection’, a key characteristic of the autonomous individual (Durkheim, 2019[1957]: 98–9).

Historical understanding, then, was important. In The Gift Relationship Titmuss proposed that Mauss had ‘sensitively demonstrated’ how ‘non-economic giving’ illustrated the ‘texture of personal and group relationships in different cultures, past and present’. Reflecting on the ‘meaning of customs in historical civilisations’ was a reminder that whatever had been gained, it illustrated too ‘how much we have lost’. So ‘large-scale economic systems’ had replaced structures wherein exchange ‘was not an impersonal but a moral transaction, bringing about and maintaining personal relationships between individuals and groups’ (Titmuss, 2018[1970]: 54).

Titmuss's analysis of modernity's ambiguous outcomes is evident in The Social Division of Welfare, famous for dissecting fiscal and occupational welfare. He made two explicit references to The Division of Labor, its title echoed in Titmuss's own contribution. In modern societies there were three types of ‘dependency’: ‘natural’, for instance old age; ill health, in part ‘culturally determined’; and that caused, ‘wholly or predominantly’, by man-made ‘social and cultural factors’, for example unemployment. Consequent upon ‘the increasing division of labour’, one of the 20th century's ‘outstanding characteristics’ was more and more people consciously experiencing, at one or more stages in their lives, ‘the process of selection and rejection’. Titmuss argued that this essay was not the occasion to pursue ‘the deeper psychological implications of this trend’, although these had been implied by Durkheim's observation ‘that as man becomes more individual and specialised he becomes more socially dependent’. All this was of ‘primary importance’ in understanding the development of welfare systems. Titmuss's second reference occurs in a passage arguing that increasing social differentiation may lead to more social inequalities, so that ‘failure, ineffectiveness, and social inferiority’ gain ‘a deeper significance’. ‘External’ inequalities, that is those not natural in origin, became ‘more insupportable as labour becomes more divided’. In turn, this encouraged the growth of ‘sectional aims, invariably rewarding the most favoured in proportion to the distribution of power and occupational success’. Those excluded from such developments, though, became more dependent and, in pursuing their aspirations, more aware of this dependency, more liable to ‘failure’, and ‘more exposed to pain’. Pursuing equity in social policy had therefore become more complex as a result of ‘the increasing division of labour’, the ‘diversification, creation and decay of functional skills and roles’, and the ‘growth of sectional solidarities’ (Titmuss, 1956: 12–13, 22–3).

What did the Durkheim passages say? The first outlined differences between societies without a division of labour, characterized by mechanical solidarity, and those with it, characterized by organic solidarity (for concise definitions of ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’ solidarity, see Lukes, 2001: 3899–900). The latter was ‘possible only if each [individual] has a sphere of action which is peculiar to him; that is, a personality’. Effectively, then, ‘on the one hand, each [individual] depends as much more strictly [sic] on society as labor is more divided; and, on the other, the activity of each [individual] is as much more personal as it is more specialized’. The second passage acknowledged the historic existence of inequalities. Such injustices had little impact ‘as long as contractual relationships are but little developed and the collective conscience is strong’. With increasing division of labour and the weakening of ‘social faith’, however, they became more socially unacceptable. Durkheim continued, although Titmuss did not directly cite this section, that the ‘task of the most advanced societies is, then, a work of justice’. They must strive to ‘make social relations always more equitable, so as to assure the free development of all our socially useful forces’. Since organic solidarity was supplanting mechanical solidarity, it was thus ‘indispensable that external conditions become level. The harmony of functions and, accordingly, of existence, is at stake’ (Durkheim, 1933: 131, 384–8). Titmuss's concerns, then, echoed Durkheim's.

In 1964 Titmuss described the ‘limits’ of the present ‘welfare state’, whose components were becoming ‘more difficult to define … with any precision’. As societies became more complex and specialized, likewise welfare systems. Functionally, they reflected, and responded to, ‘the larger social structure and its division of labour’, phenomena complicating efforts ‘to define the causal agents of change’. Contemporary ‘socio-economic arrangements’ showed, too, that while ‘neo-classical economics and the private market’ might be able to quantify social benefits, they were not ‘organized to estimate social disruption’ and so unable to ‘provide adequately for the public needs’ created by socio-economic change. The ‘social costs’ incurred by the drug thalidomide's devastating effect on pregnant women illustrated this point (Stewart, 2020: 5; Titmuss, 1964b: 28). The following year Titmuss attacked a favourite target, social scientists arguing that continuous economic growth and the ‘welfare state’ would resolve residual social problems, hence bringing about the ‘end of ideology’. Such notions were ‘unhistorical’. They envisaged the industrial revolution as a ‘once-and-for-all affair’, thereby ignoring the emergence of ‘monopolistic concentrations of economic power’, corporations as ‘private government with taxing powers’, social disorganization and cultural deprivation, and the ‘growing impact of automation and new techniques of distribution in economically advanced societies’. Increased inequalities resulted, problematic in themselves, and because ‘history suggests that human nature is not strong enough to maintain itself in true community where great disparities of income and wealth persist’ (Titmuss, 1965: 131–2). Fragility, social and individual, was another of Titmuss's recurring concerns.

We now turn to our second theme – social science, moral purpose, and social change – starting with Jackson's remark about Titmuss's positivism. Titmuss is, understandably, often associated with his promotion of altruism and moral purpose. But he invariably based his work on empirical research, a characteristic shared with Durkheim and traditionally strong strand of British social analysis. In a 1956 speech to a conference on old age, he suggested it necessary to remind ‘ourselves from time to time that social research workers are servants and not masters in the policy-making process’. Rather, their role was to ‘widen the freedom of choice for policy-makers and administrators’. In the study of old age, relatively little had been empirically established. Nonetheless, economic and demographic change had impacted profoundly on the elderly's position, and ‘these fundamental social facts’ highlighted the context ‘within which a new technological age is developing’. One of the ‘most important needs’ in future research, then, was for ‘more hard, clearly defined, social facts’ (Titmuss, 1957a: 1, 2, 4). These comments recall Durkheim's assertion that the sociologist's role was not ‘that of the statesman’, but of establishing ‘social facts’ (in reality, a principle rejected by Titmuss and Durkheim's participation in public affairs). Nonetheless, as Titmuss further explained in an influential work of the early 1960s, his study's purpose was a ‘severely limited one’, namely analysing the statistical foundations on which ‘law and opinion in the 1950s were based’ (Titmuss, 1962: 20).

In his polemic The Irresponsible Society Titmuss complained that in contemporary public debate, ‘facts themselves matter less; all that matters is how the thing is put. Values matter less; what does matter is the kind of show that people put on.’ The ‘subject of power’ had, moreover, recently been unfashionable both in ‘the world of political action’ and in ‘those places where questions of freedom and justice are reputedly discussed’. Sociologists had ‘left it to economists, who, in turn, have left it to philosophers’. Rising living standards, meanwhile, might have obscured ‘the less obvious manifestations of arbitrary power’. Post-war Britain's economic and technological progress notwithstanding, there was no sign of ‘moral progress’, while there were indications of anti-democratic trends. These were ‘social facts of great importance’. Revisiting the case of the elderly, official negligence in uncovering their condition was among ‘the most striking signs of the irresponsibility of the 1950s’. Society's failure to ‘identify by fact, and not by inference, its contemporary and changing social problems’ inevitably resulted in its ‘social conscience and its democratic values’ languishing (Titmuss, 1960: 3, 7, 8). Around the same time, Titmuss told Merton that he had been stimulated by one of his papers (Stewart, 2020: 6). This proposed, in terms surely endorsed by Titmuss, that a ‘major function’ of social science research was establishing ‘new goals and bench-marks of the attainable’; that in addressing most ‘practical problems … collaboration among several disciplines’ was required; that, to counter ‘misconception’, the relevant ‘publics’ had to be informed of ‘pertinent data’; and that in estimating the extent to which applied research provided ‘a direct mandate for policy’ or resulted in actual policy formation, care was required (Merton, 1949: 170–1, 175, 178).

In his inaugural, Titmuss had already linked empirical research with moral purpose. He favourably cited his colleague Morris Ginsberg's 1937 lecture proposing that moral judgements of particular institutions would often be transformed if ‘we had fuller knowledge of the ends actually attained in relation to the ends they are intended to attain’. Titmuss used this passage to support his argument that a better relationship between current social services and ‘the needs of a changing society’ was unachievable ‘without more knowledge of both’. Other aspects of Ginsberg's address that probably appealed included his critique of economists who argued that their field was ‘concerned solely with means, while the problem of ends is left to ethics’. To Ginsberg this was ‘clearly untenable’, since economics could not avoid the question of ends, nor ethics that of means (Ginsberg, 1937: 326–8; Titmuss, 1951: 193).

For Titmuss, like Durkheim, social research required both ground rules and a larger vision. Empirical enquiry was the bedrock of social understanding, but not an end in itself. Rather, it was the necessary basis for social advance and allowed for the realization of ‘social conscience’ and ‘democratic values’ in confronting a constantly changing society's demands. There is a strong sense here that if the ‘facts’ can be uncovered, there will be an unanswerable, moral, case for social progress, at least as Titmuss understood it. This is comparable to Durkheim and Fauconnet's comment that ‘progress is the social fact, par excellence’, part of their argument that humanity evolved over time and that, thereby, ‘purely individual phenomena’ were distinct from ‘social facts’ (Durkheim and Fauconnet, 1904: 264; original emphasis).

Titmuss elaborated further in a 1967 volume on ‘Socialist Humanism’. With modernity's arrival, giving aid regardless of ‘economic criteria and … differences of race, colour, religion and class’ brought market values and ‘social conscience’ into ‘direct conflict’. This had had complex consequences, one of the more positive being ‘the historical emergence of social welfare institutions in the West’. Altruism, ‘strangers’ assisting other ‘strangers’, aspired to ‘fill a moral void caused by applied science’. Welfare provision had, though, inevitably ‘become more specialized and complex’, an allusion to the rise of ‘welfare professionals’. As to growing inequality, socialists challenged this not to ‘foster envy’ but because, as Tawney had argued, its disparities were ‘fundamentally immoral’. Historical experience showed that ‘human nature is not strong enough to maintain itself in true community’ when large differences in income and wealth prevailed. Societal change required a ‘major shift in values’, different rules for living, and ‘more examples of altruism to look up to’. This was, ultimately, the only way to ‘prevent the deprived and unable from becoming more deprived and unable, more cast down in a pool of apathy, frustration, crime, rootlessness and tawdry poverty’ (Titmuss, 1967: 350, 352–3, 358–9, 363–4).

This was a rather opaque essay, but Titmuss's depiction of modernity's undesirable outcomes is again clear enough: fragile societies and fragile individuals are damaged; welfare measures are thus necessary, but not uncomplicated; and should dislocation remain unaddressed, more fractures and disturbances will ensue. The solution therefore lies in moral guidance and moral force. Madeleine Davis shows that, in the 1960s, Titmuss and his circle influenced Britain's emerging New Left in its attempts at articulating ‘socialist humanism’ (the Titmuss piece cited above that discusses thalidomide appeared in its journal, the New Left Review). This envisaged a ‘transformation of values and the full emancipation of human capacities’, and a ‘practical critique’ of consumer capitalism's ‘dehumanizing tendencies of consumer capitalism’ (Davis, 2013: 71, 59, 76). A leading New Left figure, historian E. P. Thompson, praised The Irresponsible Society for uncovering ‘the real centres of economic and political power’ and showing the necessity of ‘a cleavage in consciousness, between the great business oligarchies and the people’ (Thompson, 1960: 28). Turner comments that Durkheim was ‘categorical in his view’ that external inequalities compromised organic solidarity; and Bellah that Durkheim stated ‘categorically that morality stands above’ both state and individual (Bellah, 1959: 460; Turner, 2019: xv) – approaches complementary to Titmuss's.

Confirming such concerns, Titmuss told the Social Administration Association's inaugural meeting that its field engaged with ‘different types of moral transactions’. These embodied ‘notions of gift-exchange, or reciprocal obligations, which have developed in modern societies in institutional forms to bring about and maintain social and community relations’. Mauss's The Gift depicted, in the growth of social insurance, an instance of mutual, co-operative, care expressing the dynamics of need and response in communal relationships (Titmuss, 1968: 20–1). Titmuss had his current work on blood donation in mind here, further intimating his intention to utilize anthropological insights in a 1969 speech to an Israeli audience, which learned that he had been studying analyses of ‘the gift’, including those by Mauss, Malinowski, and Claude-Levi Strauss (Stewart, 2020: 496–7). In The Gift Relationship itself voluntary blood donation's broader significance was stressed. The notion of ‘social rights’ had developed in the 20th century, demonstrating the ‘right to give’ in both material and non-material ways. Gift relationships should be seen ‘in their totality and not just as moral elements in blood distribution systems’, in modern societies signifying ‘the notion of “fellowship” which Tawney … conceived of as a matter of right relationships which are institutionally based’. Anthropologists had demonstrated that ‘exchange in primitive societies’ consisted of ‘reciprocal gifts’ rather than economic transactions. These exchanges had a far more important function in primitive than in modern societies, constituting ‘what Mauss called “a total social fact”, that is, an event which has significance that is at once social and religious, magic and economic, utilitarian and sentimental, jural and moral’ (Titmuss, 2018[1970]: 207, 177).

We now turn to our third theme, the emergence of powerful interest groups, and modernity's impact on individuals and on families. In his inaugural Titmuss argued that the social services, as other social institutions, must change in ‘sensitive association’ with society's changing needs. But resistance to change was strengthening, a result of ‘the “intensified division of labour” which, as Merton observed, “has become a splendid device for escaping social responsibilities”. Consequently, more attention was paid to ‘modifying human behaviour than to changing the environment’ – a comment highlighting Titmuss's consistent opposition to welfare strategies blaming individual disadvantage on moral or behavioural characteristics. Modernity's negative outcomes, for instance subverting individuals’ integrity as social actors, must be challenged, for in complex, affluent, societies ‘almost all social forces’, unless constrained by ‘strong, continuing and effective movements of criticism’, encouraged conformity (Titmuss, 1951: 193; 1960: 4).

As to those ‘escaping social responsibilities’, in his introduction to the 1964 edition of one of Tawney's most famous works Titmuss claimed that the privileged in British society struggled to accept post-war social change. They, like ‘the Trade Unions, the British Medical Association and the Law Society’, wanted to be ‘left undisturbed to live out the destinies of tradition’ (Titmuss, 1964a: 9). Around the same time, he proposed that, in pursuing economic growth, modern societies had embraced technological and scientific advances. This meant

more division of labour and specialization; more education and specialized training; more specificity in manpower recruitment and deployment; longer hierarchies in occupational positions in the labour force; larger incentives for training and mobility; more and probably larger differentials in rewards.

Such processes led to ‘disequalizing forces and, by demanding higher standards of education, training and acquired skills’, could further complicate integrating those with ‘different cultural backgrounds and levels of motivation’. While future expectations might be raised, ‘technology simultaneously raises the barriers to entry’. In the United States this was already known as ‘credentialism’, thought to be partly responsible for consolidating ‘a permanent underclass of deprived citizens, uneducated, unattached and alternating between apathetic resignation and frustrated violence’ (Titmuss, 1966: 363). Titmuss's reference to ‘different cultural backgrounds’ relates to contemporary debates about immigration's impact on British society, while the notion of a ‘permanent underclass’ had gained considerable traction in social policy analysis, especially in America. Sandel has recently dissected ‘credentialism’ and its consequences (Sandel, 2020).

The division of labour thus made professional associations more difficult to enter, more powerful, and more concerned with their members’ interests than with the interests of those whom they purportedly served. They were, therefore, evading their responsibilities not just passively but also, albeit unwittingly, through furthering inequality and exclusion. Titmuss's reference to the British Medical Association (BMA), another favourite target, was no accident. This organization had benefitted from scientific progress; an increasingly specialized division of labour; the political and cultural power accorded such bodies; and a ‘welfare state’ that, inter alia, provided employment opportunities for ambitious members of the middle class. Social harm could ensue from, for example, opposition to innovations in medical practice and organization.

The role of secondary bodies had been addressed, in a broadly positive way, by Durkheim. In the second edition of The Division of Labor he announced his intention to describe, more thoroughly than before, ‘the role that occupational groups are destined to play in the contemporary social order’. Such bodies could contain ‘individual egos’, maintain a ‘spirited sentiment of common solidarity in the consciousness of all workers’, and stop ‘the law of the strongest from being brutally applied to industrial and commercial relations’ (Durkheim, 1933: 1, 10).

Titmuss was clearly more sceptical. For him, the self-interest of organizations such as the BMA was playing a crucial, but often negative, role in the post-war ‘welfare state’. Durkheim, in an earlier era, advanced what Hayward described as a ‘reformist syndicalism’ – an alternative to class struggle enabling ‘professional associations to regulate wages and conditions of work’ and to ‘provide pensions and welfare services’ in ways appropriate to each profession (Hayward, 1960: 32). This reflected Durkheim's participation in French social scientific analysis viewing such bodies as (ideally) directly integrated into society – a rather different approach to British traditions of voluntarism (Logue, 1983: Chapters 7, 8). Titmuss nonetheless continued to cite Durkheim when discussing this contentious area. Speaking in New York in 1957, he claimed that the recent ‘rapid growth of specialized skills and functions in medicine’ had ‘greatly affected medical education’. In America this had, allegedly, created a ‘caste system’ within the profession resulting in ‘new group solidarities, as Durkheim put it, based on likenesses, skills, functions and prestige’. Specialisms fostered their own loyalties that, ‘by the nature of their internal forces, often emphasize, in an exaggerated form, status differences’. Pressure then arose for such differences to be reflected in greater pay differentials leading, in turn, to a greater possibility of ‘misunderstandings and conflict within the profession’. Specialization was, by this account, professionally divisive and so harmful to doctors themselves (Titmuss, 2018a[1958]: 126).

At the beginning of a decade-long dispute with free-market economists over health care provision, Titmuss suggested that in ‘embracing the market system, doctors would thus relinquish their role (as Durkheim puts it) as “centres of moral life”’. In such an eventuality (a reality in the US), society could not depend on them ‘to give truthful information about their patients, or even information as reliable as one normally expects from the average shopkeeper’ (Titmuss, 1963: 17). The employment of Durkheim is especially notable here for the lectures cited, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, became available in English only in 1957, suggesting that Titmuss was quickly aware of their relevance to, and complementarity with, his own work. His reference is apparently to Durkheim's proposition that each profession's ethics ‘are localized within a limited region’, hence the formation of ‘centres of a moral life’, bound together while retaining their own characteristics – ‘a kind of moral polymorphism’. Durkheim also made further claims that supported Titmuss's analysis. So, for example, the moral standards of economic life should be raised so that individuals cease to live ‘within a moral vacuum where the life-blood drains away even from individual morality’. More contentiously, from Titmuss's perspective, the ‘true cure’ for the ‘evil’ of moral absence was to ‘give the professional groups in the economic order a stability they so far do not possess’ (Durkheim, 2019[1957]: 8, 13–14). Turner notes that these lectures prefigured much of Durkheim's later work, notably on ‘social facts’, with one ‘major theme’ identifying the state's function ‘as a moral agency in modern societies’ (Turner, 2019: x).

Titmuss again shared Durkheim's concerns over modern capitalism's shortcomings. A further dimension of The Irresponsible Society was the operation of finance capital. Social problems, such as shortages of affordable housing, could not be solved by the ‘private insurance market, by property speculators, by forcing land values to insanely prohibitive levels, or by any criteria of profits and tax-free gains’. Discussing finance capital's promotion of fiscal and occupational benefits – a world of ‘fringe welfare’ – Titmuss decried the emergence of ‘the Pressure Group State’. This involved moving ‘from contract to status; from open social rights to concealed professional syndicalism; from a multiplicity of allegiances to an undivided loyalty’. In the particular case of insurance companies, long condemned by Titmuss, their growing economic weight constituted a ‘major shift in economic power in our society’ affecting ‘many important aspects of our economic life and our social values’. Their power was ‘concentrated in relatively few hands’, located ‘at the apex of a handful of giant bureaucracies’ supported by professional experts, and, effectively, unaccountable. The growth of this ‘Pressure Group State’ pointed towards greater inequality, the restriction of social rights and liberties, and a widespread ‘muffling of social protest’ (Titmuss, 1960: 10ff).

As this demonstrates, Titmuss sought to defend ‘social rights and liberties’. These included individual dignity, integrity, and psychological well-being. The state had a crucial role to play here. In critiquing ‘Diceyism’, Titmuss claimed that Dicey was, in ‘his concern for the freedom of the individual citizen’, essentially ‘opposed to the growth of public government’ – for Titmuss, a false dichotomy, echoing Durkheim's rejection of distinctions between ‘legal authority’ and ‘individual liberty’ (Titmuss, 1971: 114). As we have seen, Durkheim dismissed the ‘false antagonism’ between state and individual. Stedman Jones adds that, in consequence, the moral role of the state and individuality were intertwined. With social progress, individuals acquired more rights, and although state power had to be constrained, it could nonetheless act as agent of ‘progressive liberation’, a very different approach to that of classical liberalism (Stedman Jones, 2001: 175–6).

For Durkheim and Titmuss, the individual was central to their social vision, while flourishing only in a broader, socially integrated, context. Certain social forces, however, conspired against this. In the mid 1950s Titmuss claimed that social science was demonstrating ‘limits … to the speed at which social change can take place without causing grave psychological problems’. The latter, especially their impact on families, were ‘part of the price of economic growth’, a price not paid by growth's beneficiaries, and one ‘not revealed in all its social and psychological contours until several generations later’. Furthermore, technological change had, due to the ‘demands of standardized mass production’, led to the increasing subdivision of work. Such change had undoubtedly improved working-class living standards, but the ‘degradation of the worker, bereft of personality and of his roles as husband, father and citizen, found conscious expression in the idea of “scientific management”’. Traditional skills, and their accompanying status, were being ‘down-graded, divided or made redundant’. And when ‘modern industrial techniques’ created personal dissatisfaction and the ‘dispossession of personality’, this became a problem for both families and communities and individuals (Titmuss, 1957b: 56–7, 59, 61). The consequences of automation thus required ‘a much greater investment in people and social service rather than consumption goods’. The ‘conventional wisdom’ that machines created work was ‘losing its validity’, with ‘machines now replacing workers’. So if the first phase of industrialization had required ‘all men to work’, it now stood to ‘force many men not to work’ (Titmuss, 1964b: 35, 31).

The family, too, was changing. It was certainly a key social institution, for Durkheim a ‘centre of morality, and a school of loyalty, of selflessness and moral communing’. But it was losing its former ‘unity and identity’ and, thereby, ‘a great part of its efficacy’. Consequently, now ‘man passes a notable part of his existence far from all domestic influence’ (Durkheim, 1933: 16–17; 2019[1957]: 27). As Bellah suggested, Durkheim described how, with increasing division of labour, familial relations were ‘disentangled from relations to property, political authority, and the like’, so becoming ‘more personalized’. The family thus lost functions while ‘a more specialized unit playing a vital role in complex societies, although not the same role as in simpler societies’ emerged (Bellah, 1959: 453). Titmuss, in his inaugural, identified a potentially ‘new division of labour in the family, a rearrangement of role, of function; a new calculus of effort and reward in which the frontier between workplace and home is becoming blurred’. This might lead to stress ‘in the home and the factory; new situations of dishonesty in which men find their inherited norms no longer rewarding’. Although such stresses might ‘hurt’ families, social maladjustments ‘do not now kill us as they did in the nineteenth century. Medical science at least keeps us alive.’ Consequently, ‘old indices of social disorder’ had become less useful. It was more difficult to ‘measure the complex sickness of a complex society’, manifested by ‘stress diseases’, unstable family relationships, and mental ill health. But such quantitative challenges ‘should not prevent us … from seeking to extend our knowledge of the causes at work’ (Titmuss, 1951: 196).

In the case of women, Titmuss, arguing from a strong empirical base, agreed in 1952 that their position had, in many ways, improved during the 20th century. Nonetheless, profound social, economic, and technological change had affected woman's ‘status and role’ – marital, maternal, and economic – at various points in their married lives. By the age of 40, with half their total life expectancy still before them, the majority had ‘largely concluded their maternal role’. For most women in advanced societies, characterized by an extensive division of labour and its consequences, this was ‘a new situation’. Such societies thus faced ‘a host of new social problems’. For women these included the ‘apparent conflict between motherhood and wage-earning’, with their right ‘to an emotionally satisfying and independent life’ appearing ‘in a new guise’. One response had been increasing numbers of married mothers seeking employment so as to ‘find some solution to the social, economic and psychological problems’ facing them now, or in future. Labour market participation could be fragile in that such women were likely to be the first affected by rising unemployment. It undoubtedly had, though, contributed positively to the standard of living of a significant proportion of working-class families, and so to society as a whole (Titmuss, 2018b[1958]: 54, 57, 63–4). Durkheim, writing much earlier in the century, paid little direct attention to this matter. He proposed, in a formulation common at his time that also suggests Titmuss's later more nuanced understanding of the issue, that one function of intermediary bodies should be the supervision of ‘all that concerns the labour of women and children’. Perhaps unwittingly, though, Durkheim also rejected ‘patriarchal’ theories of the state, a position with potentially wider implications (Durkheim, 2019[1957]: 42, 49).

Conclusion: Titmuss and Durkheim

Durkheim and Titmuss operated in different historical circumstances, but close complementarities exist between their critiques of modern society, as well as evidence of the former's influence on the latter. Earlier we noted Freeden's suggestion that Durkheim was one of Titmuss's ‘intellectual heroes’, and these and similar observations, as well as the evidence presented here, suggest both that Titmuss's social thought should be taken seriously, and, from the particular standpoint of the article, that Durkheim's analyses be recognized as key contributions to its intellectual origins.

Durkheim and Titmuss acknowledged their subject matter's historical dimensions (although – a topic for further investigation – both criticized contemporary historical practice), viewing modernity as bringing both benefits and drawbacks. Unwelcome aspects of ‘traditional’ society had been discarded, notably, in principle at least, status-based hierarchies. Individuals were, again in principle, thus free to develop in previously unimagined ways. In these respects, modernity was profoundly liberating. Much of this change arose from the rapid development of the division of labour, releasing the economy from traditional constraints and promoting innovation. Unprecedented levels of wealth had been generated, leading to improved living standards, widely shared. The division of labour had, furthermore, impacted not just on the economy per se, but also on the family, a key social institution. Although their interpretations differed in emphasis, Durkheim and Titmuss agreed that the family's function was changing, in certain ways for the better. For Titmuss this had created opportunities outside the home, previously limited, for women. Meanwhile at a broad, societal, level modernity had replaced ‘mechanical’ with ‘organic’ solidarity. The latter brought with it the potential for social integration (an early casualty of modernity) as manifested for Titmuss by, for instance, the civilian population's solidaristic behaviour during the Second World War. Both Durkheim and Titmuss saw society in ‘organic’ terms, each of its components intimately connected to every other. While this had positive aspects, there were also costs should any part of the ‘organism’ suffer damage, as in fact was occurring under the strains of modernity. So we now turn to these less welcome outcomes.

Modernity's consequences included social disruption and social unease, anomie for Durkheim, ‘uncertainty’, ‘failure’, and psychological stress for Titmuss – hence his notion, indebted to Durkheimian anthropology, of ‘loss’ (see also Garland, 2014: 355; Laslett, 1965). Given organic interconnectedness, this meant that society, and its members, were vulnerable, exposed to potential or actual pathological problems. These were, both emphasized, consequent upon social dislocation, not individual shortcomings. This worked against any meaningful social integration, and the realization of organic solidarity's positive potential. For Titmuss, but not for Durkheim, this was exacerbated by the enhanced role and status of powerful professional and occupational groups that, by definition, included some while excluding many others. They therefore contributed to another unwelcome aspect of modernity, growing inequality, an issue on which Durkheim and Titmuss concurred. More than a socio-economic phenomenon, inequality was morally reprehensible and a major contributor to social and individual dislocation. This also demonstrated how modernity, and the division of labour, threatened individual rights, liberties, and sense of self. The last of these might, for example, be undermined by new, technologically driven, workplace practices that downgraded traditional skills and their associated status. For Durkheim and Titmuss, therefore, it was essential to locate individuals in the broader environment that profoundly shaped their social being and, ultimately, guaranteed their freedom.

Durkheim and Titmuss both sought social amelioration and social progress, sharing a ‘progressive’ political stance that critiqued capitalism while rejecting class conflict. So what was to be done about the crisis of modern society? Leaving matters as they stood was not an option. First, scientifically rigorous social science was required. In analysing modern society, identifying ‘social facts’, the empirical basis of social investigation, was fundamental but not sufficient. Social investigators should, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, adopt a ‘neutral’ stance towards their subject matter. From this platform, though, the pursuit of social reform and social change must be morally driven. This was central to Durkheim and Titmuss's complementary world views. Actively encouraging policies and practices that promoted social solidarity and social integration would push back against modern capitalism's self-serving rationale and depredations, moral as well as economic. In particular, misguided faith in markets, and the associated belief in an unqualified individualism that failed to place individuals in their social context, would be rejected. For Titmuss, the altruistic and voluntaristic aspects of blood donation already showed what was possible. So, to employ Titmuss's memorable, morally charged, expression, the ‘irresponsible society’ would be replaced by one characterized by ‘solidarism’, the equally memorable idea associated with Durkheim. All this is of more than historical interest. Garland proposes that if socialism's (apparent) demise has ‘left us with no viable alternative to capitalism, the question of what kind of capitalism we are to have has become the essential issue of our time’ (Garland, 2014: 361; original emphasis). In such circumstances Durkheim and Titmuss's analyses and prognoses, and the former's influence upon the latter, merit close consideration.