This book helps to rediscover a key writer from the first generation of welfare state theorists, and might induce young readers to have a closer look at his classic contributions to welfare state theory, namely his books of 1971 and 1979 (Pinker Reference Pinker1971, Reference Pinker1979). The volume mixes old and more recent contributions, published and unpublished ones, including three newly written chapters. What Pinker has to say is amazingly topical and reads fresh. Moreover, Pinker is a brilliant stylist, so one can enjoy reading this volume.

The volume is a mixed bag regarding the topics covered: it has articles on the intellectual history of British social policy, including masterly intellectual portraits of the two towering figures of that tradition (and of Pinker’s own intellectual biography), Richard Titmuss and Thomas Humphrey Marshall; on the theory and epistemology of social policy, outlining ideas from Pinker’s earlier books and beyond; on specific topics (social work, community care, national identity in Ireland); and on social policy in the UK after 2015. John Offer, Ulster University, a student of Pinker, has acted as co-editor of the volume and provides a useful general introduction plus introductions to each section.

If there is one legacy of Pinker, then it is welfare pluralism, as rightly highlighted in the title of the volume. Pinker starts from a critique of Titmuss’ ‘unitary’ or monistic model of welfare, which assumes a moral and functional superiority of state welfare or the welfare state over the economic market and voluntary provisions. Pinker calls this a ‘collectivist’ stance. Welfare pluralism in Pinker has three dimensions. First, the institutional dimension, comprising welfare state, private welfare, and voluntary welfare, with the assumption that each of the three has a role to play and that they ought to be kept distinct. Reliance on all three arenas of the welfare mix helps to reduce dependency, to which each of the three is liable. This points at the second dimension of welfare pluralism, the diversity of human values and aspirations. ‘Unitary models of welfare… ignore this diversity… and thereby impoverish the status of citizenship.’ (42f) The third dimension of welfare pluralism, the socio-spatial dimension, is a lasting major contribution of Pinker. Pinker conceives of a plurality of loyalties and felt obligations at several levels (72f): family, community, nation state, and the international system. Among these, ‘Familial altruism is the first and most natural way in which we express our concern for other people’s welfare.’ (217) Pinker is sometimes seen as a conservative or a free marketeer, but he is rather an equidistant observer. The pluralist perspective also extends to the fabric of state welfare. ‘Not all universalist services enhance the status of citizenship. Not all selectivist services debase it.’ (216)

The emphasis on pluralism is based on Pinker’s distinctly sociological conceptualization of social policy as a social relationship between givers and receivers, following Georg Simmel. This leads him to a micro perspective, which emphasizes the moral foundations of social policy – that is, individual sentiments, views, felt obligations, and loyalties: ‘ … the worlds of citizenship and welfare are far from being coterminous. The boundaries of citizenship are drawn in terms of the coverage and content of formal rights … Beyond these boundaries … [it] is more accurate to talk in the language of felt obligations than of civil or social rights.’ (232) The micro approach also exposes national variations of state welfare beyond Esping-Andersen’s ‘welfare regimes’.

In the history of welfare state research, which began to unfold in the 1970s, Pinker’s work is a rare case of a sociological theory, and of a theory that emphasizes the social and cultural foundations of social policy. Pinker pursues a ‘pluralist’ approach, which Alber (Reference Alber1982) distinguished from ‘Neo-Marxist’ approaches. The former includes writers like Flora, Alber, de Swaan, Achinger, Heclo, and Kaufmann, but has been sidelined by the latter; political economy approaches have assumed hegemony since the 1990s.

The sociological approach also enables Pinker to highlight the dark sides of public welfare. He elaborates the dependency, the stigma, and the social control that often go along with public provisions. Pinker is the most important theorist in the tradition of Marshall, but he delves into the micro foundations of welfare and social rights and into the dark sides of public welfare more than Marshall did (see his critique of Marshall, 38f, 225, 229f).

Methodologically, Pinker seeks ‘to assert the claims of impartial scholarship against those of moralising partisanship’ (41). He sees writers like Titmuss and Townsend as ‘welfare alchemists’, who are in search of the ‘philosopher’s stone’, by envisaging a Golden Age of all-embracing universalist public welfare institutions and a reduced market sphere, while missing the dark sides and the limitations of state welfare.

Are the articles in this volume, some of which are almost half a century old, still relevant? They are. Pinker’s writings add to the ideational turn of social policy analysis (which came long after Pinker’s main work), by focusing on the sentiments of ordinary people rather than the ideas of the political elites. The search for a philosopher’s stone is alive in both national and global social policy debates. Pinker’s analysis of welfare alchemists and the quest for a Golden Age could well be applied to the idea of an unconditional basic income; to the reverence for universalism as design principle of public welfare programmes, renewed in global debates; to the use of human rights in global debates, seen by Moyn (Reference Moyn2010) as the ‘last utopia’; and to the recent sway of the language of rights more generally. Re-reading Pinker provides ‘a stimulus to think again about the perennial issues of social welfare’ (39, referring to Marshall).