Pinker himself in fact singles out as “impressive” the sociological work of W.G. Runciman in his Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (Runciman, 1966) with its original focus on the subjective realities of poverty, though it was while also regretting that it was largely ignored, as remains too frequently the case today.

Pinker also found encouragement in the “capability approach” to understanding and identifying injustice associated with the work of Sen. In The Idea of Justice (Sen, 2009), Sen argues that in life we do things, we have freedom to choose and not only to do things for our own wellbeing. The actual capabilities people have, the power to do things and the things they realize, come with a sense of responsibility for what we do. Moreover, the actual capabilities people have, and the things people want to do, brings us to further issues “that turn out to be quite central to the analysis on justice in the world” (Sen, 2009, p. 19).

As against the “utility-based or resource-based lines of thinking”, the capability approach takes an approach to social actors as active agents, and judges individual advantage by “a person's capability to do things he or she has reason to value. A person's advantage in terms of opportunities is judged lower than that of another if she has less capability—less real opportunity—to achieve those things that she reason to value” (Sen, 2009, p. 231). In social policy studies itself there is some sympathy for the approach (e.g., Hick, 2012), however, there is probably more resistance to it especially where agency, unlike structural features in society, is looked at askance (Dean, 2009).

Recently, “outcome-based” accountability measures have become a popular approach to policymaking and monitoring. However, may they well not dig deep enough methodologically to yield the fine-grained consciousnesses of experientially based lives which Pinker, and Sen, have sought (Birrell and Gray, 2018).

A further influential theme of Social Theory and Social Policy covers exchange and stigma. In Commitment to Welfare Richard Titmuss urged a distinction, which become frequently cited, between gifts or unilateral transfers which characterized the “social market” and exchange or bilateral transfers which characterized the “economic market” (Titmuss, 1968, p. 22). Pinker criticized robustly this distinction as unduly speculative. Did the community share the belief that the state provided the values that were most likely to minimize stigma? Pinker asked for relevant research, not least to show whether, in everyday life, there is a distinction made between the relative powers of “givers” and “receivers” of services, in which the values of the economic market are also reflected in social welfare systems.

Titmuss himself selected voluntary blood donations as a case study to provide a test of where the “social” begins and where the “economic” ends. To this end, Titmuss reached out to social anthropology, in the shape of The Gift (Essai sur le don) by Mauss (1990), originally published in 1925. For Titmuss, that study gives us a lesson in how we can provide and extend “opportunities for altruism in opposition to the possessive egoism of the market place” (Titmuss, 1970, p. 13). However, the anthropologist Mary Douglas tellingly believed that Mauss would have disapproved of the use Titmuss made of his work: Mauss would have said “Nonsense!” to Titmuss's idea “that the archetypal pure-gift relationship is the anonymous gift of blood, as if there could be an anonymous relationship. Even the idea of a pure gift is a contradiction” (Douglas, 1990: x; see also Fontaine, 2002: 424). Hart has similarly observed that “Mauss's chief ethical conclusion is that the attempt to create a free market for private contracts is utopian and just as unrealizable as its antithesis, a collective based solely on altruism” (Hart, 2014, p. 41). Mauss himself, then, had rejected the Titmussian binary opposition for which Titmuss uses Mauss as a source. The “pure” models of selfish vs. generous economic action distract from the complex interplay between our individuality and belonging in subtle ways to others. Indeed, in The Idea of Welfare Pinker gives prominence to the plurality of avenues, from families to markets and to the state itself, by which people may choose to pursue their own and their family's welfare and wellbeing, and that of others.

Pinker concluded it was uncertain that Titmuss's and the general Fabian belief that universal social services would minimize felt stigma and the low take-up of benefits as compared with services administered under a selective, means-tested regime. Once again, the paramount need was to gain reliable knowledge about the social reality of felt obligation in everyday life, or its absence, and to enable that knowledge to be so disseminated as to permeate the pores of policymaking and delivery at all levels (Pinker commented further on Titmuss in Ch 5 in Offer and Pinker, 2017, p. 93–112).

Given as current facts of social life that conditional lines are drawn between concern for others and self-interest, whether strong or weak, the exercise of stigmatization is, as Pinker observed, “a highly sophisticated form of violence in so far as it is rarely associated with physical threats or attack. It can best be compared to those forms of psychological torture in which the victim is broken psychically and physically but left to all outward appearances unmarked” (Pinker, 1971/2022, p. 175). Naturally, stimulation in some form of Durkheimian “moral education” can be encouraged, with any ensuing modifications in values and action being duly registered in the practical “sociology of morals” as Pinker well understood (Pinker, 1971/2022, p. 180); but the world as it is experienced needs to be distinguished from what one would prefer it to be, whether for better or worse. Robert Walker's The Shame of Poverty (Walker, 2014) has more recently explored a similar landscape within a comparative perspective; Pinker should be recognized as a pathfinder for Walker's study.

However, it is 43 years after Social Theory and Social Policy first appeared, with its criticisms of the lack of focus on the experiences of everyday life in social policy studies that Pinker was then advancing. And those well-grounded criticisms have been just outlined again here. It is, therefore, astonishing with the passage of all those years, yet perfectly justifiable, that Walker still it feels it is necessary to underline that “people experiencing poverty must be the experts on their own condition”. “Studying poverty and making policy”, adds Walker, “in the absence of such insights, while commonplace, is logically indefensible and likely to result in distortion and to policies that are ineffectual and counterproductive”. Naturally, it may be that people experiencing poverty may need further information; without it “they may not be able fully to contextualize what they know or to isolate individual and structural causes and correlates” (Walker, 2014, p. 182–83). But this level of analysis is one that must be developed in partnership and dialogue with those experts on their experiences of their everyday lives, not misread as a substitute for experiences themselves.

A notable feature of his work how Pinker traces the origins of social policy studies in the nineteenth century, with the prevailing political and economic ideas of those origins being set within the wider context of the times. Nascent policy-making including the use of research as “hard” evidence to fuel the drive for often rival schemes of social reform and the overarching commitment to tackling “social problems”, by lobbying for fresh legislation and extended administrative responsibilities. Pinker had conducted research into the English Poor Law, publishing English Hospital Statistics in 1966, and accordingly he shared important insights into Poor Law reform in the 1830s, and into the development of a general hospital service from 1867 within its auspices (Pinker, 1966), first in London and then beyond–in England and Wales by 1891 “3 in every 4 hospital beds” were provided by Poor Law institutions (Pinker, 1971/2022, p. 72).

As a generic and complex institution before the “welfare state”, the Poor Law richly merited this level of attention, still denied it in many social policy studies. A degree of local variety in provision between Poor Law Unions could allow an opportunistic failure to comply with the guidance of the central controlling administration, often to the benefit of local interests and the local poor themselves. The Poor Law structure itself, with its schools and outdoor and indoor medical provision, and similar relief to older people, meant that the “stigma” of receiving poor relief became largely an issue in the twentieth century for the able-bodied unemployed and their families.

Inevitably this leads us on into the hugely significant Royal Commission on the Poor Law (set up in 1905; issuing its majority and minority reports in 1909). The Royal Commission of 1909 was divided on the way forward, for the Fabian minority, led by Beatrice Webb, the Poor Law should be broken up, with specific needs allocated to separate and specialized services staffed by experts, while the majority, led by Helen Bosanquet recommended rebuilding it as Public Assistance, with a strong input from the voluntary sector.

Pinker shrewdly remarked that the minority report was “autocratic in its prescriptions and insensitive to the realities of everyday life for ordinary people” (Pinker, 1971/2022, p. 83), whereas the majority was decidedly more sympathetic in that regard. Here lay a conflict to surface again in Pinker's own experience. Although the immediate impacts on policy of both reports were negligible, comparing and contrasting the reports still provides vivid insights into the complex and frequently still-enduring texture of the theoretical and ideological variables as applied to the ends and means of achieving welfare accompanied by democratic values.

When Unions and the Poor Law ceased to relieve the unemployed in 1937, once a new central body the Unemployment Assistance Board of 1935 finally assumed the task, the prime motive was to assert strong central control over finance. This step removed the “problem” of the leniency of some Unions toward the relief of their unemployed; it was not primarily about freeing claimants from the allegedly unpopular Poor Law but imposing centralized and tighter financial controls! (Gilbert, 1970, p. 188).

The Future of Voluntary Organizations (the Report of the Wolfenden Committee, 1978) was made possible by the support of the Joseph Rowntree Trust and the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. The Committee reviewed the role and functions of voluntary organizations for the next quarter century. It assumed that “the advent of what is comprehensively known as ‘The Welfare State”' (Wolfenden Committee, 1978, p. 9) had made timely a review. As well as also considering relationships with the state and commercial providers for meeting need, the Wolfenden report felt that it very significant indeed that a further “system” of meeting needed required urgent and sustained consideration, what it called “the informal network of support provided by family, friends and neighbors” (Wolfenden Committee, 1978, p. 15). While this kind of support had achieved very limited attention in an earlier official Report to the government on social work, the Report of the Committee Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services of 1968 (the Seebohm Report, 1968), it was the Wolfenden Report which inaugurated the process whereby the topic became incorporated as a central focus in “official” recommendations for the future direction of social policy in the UK. However, the Labor Government's response to Wolfenden, The Government and the Voluntary Sector: A Consultative Document (Home Office and Voluntary Services Unit, 1978), was of interest in that it seemed bewildered about the meaning of the ‘informal system': the only reference to the topic is the narrow and awkward one of “volunteers caring for dependent relatives” (Home Office and Voluntary Services Unit, 1978, p. 32), not, as might be expected, “family members caring for dependent relatives”.

In 1973 Pinker had published his Lecture “The Welfare State”, arising from his preparatory work on The Idea of Welfare, in which he remarks that “[t]he way in which ordinary citizens define and seek to enhance their own state of welfare merits as much attention as the ways in which academics define the welfare state” (Pinker, 1973, p. 3). In November 1977, he wrote a Report to the Research Initiatives Board of the (then) Social Sciences Research Council, Research Priorities in the Personal Social Services, recommending the encouragement of studies into the “changing framework of assumptions about the relationship between community care and residential care, the role of the informal care systems and the balance between the statutory, voluntary and private care sectors” (Pinker, 1977a, p. 35–36). Pinker was already familiar with pioneering books and articles featuring studies of informal care such as Mayer and Timms (1970), Bayley (1973), Glastonbury et al. (1973), Topliss (1975), and Glampson et al. (1977). Other valuable sources then placing a spotlight on informal care include Collins and Pancoast (1976), Abrams (1978) (on Abrams's research see also Bulmer, 1986), and Robinson (1978). All this research shared the central belief in the sound sociological approach that understanding the social relations themselves as interpreted by the actors involved was pivotal, as opposed to applying from the start a narrowly administrative and normatively-driven view as to what would be “useful” for policy and practice.

At the time, The Idea of Welfare was unique as a synoptic and sociologically informed study of welfare, and as focused moreover on controversial concepts and principles at stake in the degree of attention given to matters pertaining to informal care. Of course, Pinker was already primed to recognize the shortcomings which afflicted the focus of earlier traditions of social policy research. The lesson of Wolfenden was that a book was overdue to draw more explicit and wider attention to the new research area, then on the verge of mushrooming (on which see Parker, 1990). The neglect of informal care as a form of welfare and its interfaces with statutory and voluntary social services was reprehensible enough, but it had become united with the lamentable neglect of other linked and wider key matters on which a well-grounded knowledge of everyday social life and welfare interactions needed to depend:

In this book and in earlier Social Theory and Social Policy arguably the heart of his message was the need to listen to the voices and see the actions of ordinary people as active agents.

It was becoming clear, therefore, that ordinary people are going about the putting together the best welfare and wellbeing outcomes they can for themselves and the members of their families as they regard it, and sometimes other people as well. It must then be an oversight that Deacon and Mann describe Pinker as “almost wholly” neglecting “agency” (Deacon and Mann, 1999, p. 415). A no less questionable claim about social policy and administration in general has been made: “in the 1960s and 1970s”, Welshman reported, “the notion of human agency was ignored” (Welshman, 2004, p. 226). Further comments on the place of agency are made in the later section “On a Mixture of Means to Welfare”.

Richard Titmuss had died in 1973. In 1977 Pinker observed that “few scholars have so dominated the development of an academic subject over so long a period of time as did Richard Titmuss”. The subject area was social policy and administration; these days, of course, usually known as social policy. Titmuss was “one of those rare thinkers who are able to shift the whole focus of debate in a field of study and thereby open up entirely new areas of intellectual enquiry” (Pinker, 1977b, p. vii). While Pinker had studied and researched with Titmuss (and with Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith) at the London School of Economics, by the 1970s he had become Lewisham Professor of Social Administration, Goldsmiths and Bedford Colleges London 1972–74, and then Professor of Social Studies, Chelsea College London 1974–78. Then he returned to LSE, becoming Professor of Social Work Studies 1978-93 and Professor of Social Administration 1993–96.

In 2006, when reflecting on Titmuss's influential book of 1970, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, Pinker remarked that both his own earlier book Social Theory and Social Policy of 1971 and his The Idea of Welfare

Pinker's critical engagement with Titmuss is at the heart of The Idea of Welfare. His criticism takes neither the Marx-indebted pathways of Ginsburg's Class, Capital and Social Policy (Ginsburg, 1979) and Gough's The Political Economy of the Welfare State (Gough, 1979), nor Hayek's uncompromising liberal individualism of Individuals and Social Order (Hayek, 1976). If a normative welfare unitarism characterized Titmuss's outlook, as Pinker has judged it, a model of welfare pluralism, in the first place descriptive, was foremost in Pinker's own mind. For Pinker, much of Titmuss's writing was “charged with the intensity of his moral commitment to a vision of collectivist social progress” (Pinker, in Offer and Pinker, 2017, p. 107). Early in The Idea of Welfare, Pinker argues that the task in the study of social welfare

In a similar vein, Deacon described Titmuss as “first and foremost a moralist” (Deacon, 2002, p. 197). The historian Jose Harris was more exact; Titmuss's “social philosophy … was full of the muffled resonances of the Idealist discourse of the Edwardian age” (Harris, 1999, p. 59–60). This was passed on to Titmuss through R.H. Tawney from philosophers such as T.H. Green as Oxford. The State and its arms possessed a holistic grasp of moral insight and virtue, and welfare, above that was available to ordinary citizens.³

Pinker did not share that view, instead drawing attention to “conditional altruism”, which refers to, say, in the familial and thus informal context, of negotiating how best to use its resources to advance the welfare and wellbeing of its members. Family decisions are likely to take the relative needs, merits and deserts of the members in to account.⁴ Pinker argues that with reference to conditional altruism, and against Titmuss, that analyses relating to welfare matters which discuss sentiments in terms of “egoism” and “altruism” as polar opposites in social life, do not take adequate account “of the subtle interplay of loyalties which characterize people”s notions of welfare obligation and entitlement” (Pinker, 1979/2019, p. 10). These ideas are also explored with particular reference to “reciprocity” in Bulmer (1986, p. 103–117).

Pinker made the further the analytical point that a sound understanding of social policy needs to know the rules of entitlement and obligation that pertain in formal interactions of, say, social workers and service users, and also the everyday and informal version of such “rules” of entitlement and obligation as interpreted in actual familial and communal settings. The capacity for conflict but also opportunistic cooperation between agile actors moving across these different sets of “rules” or terrains means that without it we lack a necessary insight into what makes an adequate “typology of social welfare” (Pinker, 1979/2019, p. 43).⁵

The formal/informal distinction poses a real difficulty in Titmuss: what is intended to be descriptive can become one-dimensional, and what is intended to be normative or prescriptive, can become too inflexible. For Pinker, the acceptability of particular social policies in social life derives “not only from their instrumental effectiveness but from the sense of meaning and significance they have for the citizenry” (Pinker, 1979/2019, p. 43). His interests were not the binary opposite of those of Titmuss but the different nuances were substantial and prescient, most visibly over the direction of sociology and in particular in the area of moral and generative agency within everyday life.

However, it is notable that Pinker sharply distinguished his own research-led position from any kind of “populism”, being skeptical of any alleged populist “consensus” as furnishing an acceptable basis for the content of social policy and aims of social welfare (Pinker, 1984). In 2019, as populist movements grew apace, something he not imagined in 1979, Pinker worried that their supporters and leaders are “so strongly disposed to end up at the polar ends of the left-right political spectrum and then claim their extremist views on all the big political issues, represent the ‘general will' of ordinary people” (Pinker, 2019).

The lack of intellectual depth in comparative studies in the study of welfare concerned Pinker, and part of The Idea of Welfare is devoted to comparative developments in the UK, the USA and Russia, adopting the wide typology of social welfare he had summarized. The new focus is on the distinctive cultural expectations, social histories and political traditions which are represented, and on the nature of the differing experiences of ordinary people as a range of social and political changes were unfolding, with a particular emphasis on their perceptions of the welfare-related implications upon them. While it might be relatively straightforward to quantify basic differences (and similarities) between the places involved, Pinker was tackling the task of showing how divergent concepts and theories of “welfare” itself were associated with divergent historical, cultural and social situations, at home as well as abroad (compare Higgins, 1981, p. 163–67, Ashford, 1986; see also Baldock, 1999).

Two examples may be highlighted. On historical change in Russia, Pinker observes, “the question of land reform dominated all other issues of social welfare”. Modern forms of social service were of relatively marginal importance in what was achieved by the government and in what the mass of the population expected: “as late as 1917 80 per cent of the Russian population were still peasants for whom the ultimate form of welfare was the possession of land” (Pinker, 1979/2019, p. 142). The other example, evidenced beyond the discussion of Russia, is that, before the emergence of modern welfare states, “emigration was a traditional means by which men tried to provide for their welfare on their own terms” (Pinker, 1979/2019, p. 230). There are connections between these two examples: they both remain pressing issues today (Pinker returned to these topics in “Citizenship, civil war and welfare: the making of modern Ireland”, in Twenty-first Century Society, vol. 1, no 1, 23-38, 2006, reprinted in Offer and Pinker, 2017, 171–186, with an accompanying “Afterthought”).

Both examples open up the salutary point that there is much to learn “about the welfare practices of ordinary people in the area of social life which are unregulated by formal policies and expert opinions, We can add a new dimension to our knowledge if we give more attention to the times when the range of such formal regulation was far more limited than it is today” (Pinker, 1979/2019, p. 197).

An interesting theme in The Idea of Welfare is Pinker's disavowal of Titmuss's rather bald dichotomy between “the social market” (allocation of resources by the state) and “the economic market”, arguing they are in social realty inextricably linked. The policy analyst and economist Martin Knapp noted Pinker's demonstration of how Titmuss had “generated a deal of confusion” with that “false dichotomy”, although Knapp's own and optimistic belief that the dichotomy “seems to have been largely dispelled” was probably premature (Knapp, 1984, p. 10, compare Pinker, 1979/2019, p. 247). When associated with a “welfare pluralist” or mixed economy of welfare perspective, the two “markets” are seen as co-producers of welfare, with the important participation of informal care and voluntary organizations alongside.⁶

Julian Le Grand, the Richard Titmuss Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics since 1993, had come to a similar outlook to Pinker in the conclusion in the 2006 edition of his Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy. In that version he included a Postscript in which was a substantial extract from Pinker's essay “From gift relationships to quasi-markets: an odyssey along the policy paths of altruism and egoism” (of 2006, reprinted in Offer and Pinker, 2017, p. 209–223). Le Grand now recognized (Le Grand, 2006: 208):

As has been emphasized already, in these achievements Pinker imported a strong sociological dimension. From the outside social work, the study of social policy and sociology often blur into one. But they are not. Bob Pinker saw the urgency of bringing much more of the sociological imagination into the study of social policy in the 1970s, and there were some studies taking that view (e.g., Warham, 1973). It seemed by the end of century, though, it was argued that a greater rapprochement was still desirable (Offer, 1991, 1999a). Since welfare relations are always intertwined with social relations (as Morris, 2020 has recently emphasized), that remains the case.