Social theory and policy

One focus of Pinker's attention was the distinction commonly made in social policy analysis between ‘residual’ and ‘institutional’ conceptions of the role of the state in the provision of welfare. Pinker accepted that this essentially individualistic/collectivist binary division relating to the aims of social policy captured real normative differences held by academic analysts of the ‘welfare state’, and also that in practice actual policies and provisions in a country might be categorised in terms of one or the other, or as a mixture of both, depending on historical and cultural experience and the contrasting complexions of the political parties forming governments over time. The problem was that these academic perceptions and analyses of social reality had become confusingly equated with the social reality of actual service users and members of a society in general. In the process, assumptions were being made about the motivations and moral dispositions of persons. For Pinker, intellectual development was not to be confused with practical activity or political commitment: ‘A new generation of specialists in social policy and administration is less impressed by the eclecticism in which its established members still rejoice and is more disturbed by its persistent lack of conceptual and theoretical foundations’ (1971: 13). To advance a contextualised understanding of social policy itself, the pressing need was to renounce a reliance upon assumptions and undertake instead the actual study of the applications of altruistic thought and practice by ordinary people in their everyday lives, in their aspirations for social change and in their conceptions of for what and on what principles the state, as opposed to markets, families and community organisations should assume responsibility.Footnote ⁴

Pinker was not advocating ‘going native’ in terms of the content or reach of social policy which might be prescribed, but seeking a richer and more sociologically grounded kind of inquiry into how welfare (and not just a ‘welfare state’) was reasoned about and came to possess the meanings it did in everyday life.Footnote ⁵ The development of research and social theory in this manner would redirect the discipline of social policy and administration away from one in which ‘too much is prescribed, too much indicted and too little explained’ (1971: 166). While Pinker acknowledged that user consultation and local participation had merits in connection with the evaluation of the aims and provisions of services, he noted there was a linked risk of introducing further forms of unexamined and possibly oppressive normativity (1971: 130–2). The position he adopted was neither a dogmatic anti-statism nor an apologia for any normatively popular status quo: it was held because he anticipated that the study of ‘subjective states of social consciousness’ would facilitate a supply of evidence enabling a genuine dialogue to arise about perceptions in conflict, offering, in turn, enhanced legitimacy to the development of social reform in democracies (1971: 131–2).

Pinker pointedly distanced himself from the argument, advanced by the then in-vogue radical polemics of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (Reference Marcuse1964), that ‘the map of social consciousness cannot be expected to delineate the true profiles of human discontent and frustration, for it is in the nature of capitalism that the masses do not know the difference between true and false consciousness’ (1971: 125). Concepts associated with an intellectualist ideology, in this case ‘false consciousness’, could serve to define away or devalue ideologically uncomfortable evidence in a manner such that, in effect, it ceased to signify as evidence at all.Footnote ⁶ For Pinker it was important to distinguish the untestable propositions of ideology from the propositions of theory which, properly understood, fell short of certainty, were subject to disconfirmation and were held by those who advanced them in an open, even sceptical, frame of mind. Normative theory in particular was closely associated with ideology, but a distinction could nevertheless be maintained as he noted in 1982: ‘The distinction between normative theory and ideology is especially difficult to draw because it is a matter of degree as well as of kind. I think there are two relevant criteria: first, the general Popperian point as to whether or not the theory is set out in a testable and falsifiable way and, secondly, the degree of unprejudiced consideration that is given to new evidence and alternative explanations’ (1982a: 7).

Pinker's orientation was to give him a focus on aspects of social life in general, in which ‘positive discrimination’, stigma, giving and receiving, conditional altruism, access to land and property, and migration and even civil war loomed large. He believed that this focus would enrich and make more accurate and useful our understanding of whatever principles might be advanced to improve policy and whatever actions might be adopted to deliver benefits when welfare was in question.

As a prerequisite of the analytical explorations which Pinker envisaged, he distinguished between ideas of a ‘welfare state’ and a ‘state of welfare’ (Reference Pinker1973: 2). The first concept concerned specified forms of intervention by governments in the processes and outcomes of unregulated or ‘inadequately’ regulated market operations, while the second referred ‘both to the subjective feelings of ordinary people about the nature of welfare, and to the complete range of activities by which they seek to enhance their own well-being through individual and collective endeavour’. In the interests of understanding and explaining ‘faring well’ as a social phenomenon ‘[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’ (Reference Pinker1973: 3).

These points for Pinker applied to the study of any one country and to comparative studies. More was required by way of change than ecumenical nods towards the mere existence of differing ideas of moral or social progress. What Pinker regarded as essential was encapsulated in his distinction between ‘those modes of enquiry which seek to establish the criteria by which one system of welfare can be deemed morally superior to another and those which seek to explain why there are similarities and dissimilarities between the welfare systems of different countries’. Pinker argued that these two ‘forms of intellectual enterprise’ were both equally necessary, adding that, ‘while it is difficult in practice to keep them apart, the fact of their qualitative difference needs always to be borne in mind’ (Reference Pinker1973: 2). Within social administration and policy in the 1970s, Pinker detected a default normative position, ‘strongly collectivist in value orientation’, in which ‘social welfare is assumed to be almost synonymous with institutional variants of what we term “the welfare state”’. Many historical accounts of social policy had fallen into line, describing its growth as a ‘kind of pilgrim's progress towards a promised land’ (Reference Pinker1973: 2).Footnote ⁷ A consequence of conflating the perspectives Pinker had distinguished was to mistake judgement for social explanation. As a result, the academics’ conception of the ‘real’ ‘moral society’, in itself unexceptionable, had led them into assuming for themselves ‘the role of public guardians against the immoralities of the economic market’, while overlooking in their perspective both that ‘some citizens believe that the social market generates its own forms of injustice’ and that there is ‘a vastly complex range of human aspirations and activities . . . within and between different societies’ (Reference Pinker1973: 2).

At the time, Roy Parker (Reference Parker1974) highlighted the value of Pinker's distinction between concepts of the ‘welfare state’ and ‘states of welfare’: ‘Whereas the notion of a welfare state may provide a unified and unifying concept, states of welfare are individual and often irreconcilable. As he goes on to say, social administration has not shown much interest in this distinction, nor in the subjective definition of well-being’. Were the interest to grow, ‘some challenging discoveries might be made obliging us to reconsider conventional views on how improvements in “welfare” might best be achieved’ (Reference Pinker1974: 568). We lack, Pinker had already observed in Social Theory and Social Policy, an understanding of ‘why individuals define their needs as they do, and why these definitions so often appear to be at variance with those of the social scientists’ (1971: 106).

Pinker singled out as exceptional W. G. Runciman's Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. Runciman had substantiated empirically the ‘distance’ between occurrences of low levels of grievance or resentment expressed by persons over their situation in respect of inequality when the rectification of the actual inequality involved was justified by appeal to Rawlsian ‘social justice’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker1971: 108–15). As Pinker (and Runciman) noted, deeper insight into subjective levels of meaning may call into question some of the assumptions about the meanings of specific social conditions underpinning reformist normative preferences. Nevertheless, a focus ‘on the subjective states of consciousness and expectations of the poor is necessary . . . if the concept of relative poverty is to have any meaning at all’ (1971: 115). Valuing the ideas of one group above those of another in this kind of context would constitute a distortion of the truth about the meanings attached to social life by its participants.

Pinker went on to emphasise the need to improve our understanding of public attitudes towards social services. To achieve this, we need ‘better maps of the current levels of satisfaction and discontent and more convincing explanations of why people hold the range of attitudes and expectations they do’ (1971: 110). This way, social theory and intellectual ideologies remain distinct, making it possible that a well-grounded understanding of social life may over time bring a change in everyday public understandings and meanings: ‘Sociological theory does not enable us to distinguish “goodness” from “badness”, although it may provide new forms of knowledge and insight which can be used for a variety of moral purposes’ (1971: 130).Footnote ⁸

In this connection, Pinker drew particular attention to the evident distinction in social life (‘akin to a psychological proposition’) between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’. In varying degrees, states of dependency and a shortage of resources can compromise the status of the receiver and act as widespread sources of stigmatisation (1971: 170). What citizens may expect of social services:

As it happens, Pinker added, there are often contexts in which persons perceive themselves as solely receivers or givers, even though they are both, as in the benefit claimant who pays value added tax or the charitable donor, eligible for tax relief.

It is seldom that the explicit aim of social services is to perpetuate or extend stigma. However, the need to ration provision or the normative orientations of staff may be experienced as forms of coercion by the users of a service, and this subjective experience, whether intended or unintended, generates self-reinforcing perceptions of inferiority. Indeed, Pinker suggested, services may be stratified by the levels of dependency with which they deal (1971: 201, 207). Stigma itself will vary in its intensity among receivers of ‘gifts’ according to the variables of depth, distance and time. For the relatively young and fit, their prospective periods of independence serve to prevent any categorisation of them as in a state of dependency in relation to the fields of acute illness and education, whereas dependency is firmly associated with chronic illness in old age. Reparations and rewards for past service also ‘thin’ the feelings of dependency. When social or spatial distance leads to remoteness and unfamiliarity, stigma may be more strongly enforced and felt. If dependence is of long duration, a person may adopt an identity very largely determined by the form of dependency in question. The imposition of stigma ‘is the commonest form of violence used in democratic societies . . . 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’ (1971: 175). The phenomenon of stigma is of key significance in understanding the forms and aims of social services and the power imbalances in democratic societies in which, for the most part, conflict is institutionalised.Footnote ⁹

One important achievement of Social Theory and Social Policy was to establish a framework for thinking about welfare and policy in which it became obligatory to consider familial and other sources of ‘informal care’ as priority areas of research.Footnote ¹⁰ At this stage, however, Pinker had specified few of the details of what kinds of research were required.

Social policy, a sociology of morals and marrying formal and informal care

During the 1970s, Pinker made explicit the areas of study he had in mind, under the heading of what he described as a ‘sociology of morals’:

In The Idea of Welfare (Reference Pinker1979), Pinker maintained his argument that policy makers, welfare professionals and academics often adhere to ideas of social and individual welfare that are substituted for but in fact related problematically to the ideas of social and individual welfare held in ordinary life. There is a tendency to ascribe moral and epistemological superiority to particular ideas of welfare. However, the approach most likely to advance our understanding of the meaningfulness of social reality for the actors involved is the non-normative and sociologically descriptive study of the plurality of ideas, with each idea accorded an equal epistemological status. If the basic point was an amplification of his earlier position on the concept of welfare, this position was now complemented by a body of literature displaying contextual sensitivity in relation to cognate concepts. Robert Dingwall had argued the case in respect of the concepts of health and illness in his Aspects of Illness of Reference Dingwall1976, and others, notably Carrier and Kendall (Reference Carrier and Kendall1973 and Reference Carrier and Kendall1977), had treated a range of policy-related concepts similarly. In his writing, Pinker always eschewed explicit references to ‘phenomenology’ and ‘ethnomethodology’ but an underlying concern with everyday meanings and practices, with ‘the meanings of morality – and rules in general – in everyday life’ (Douglas, Reference Douglas1970: 9), was nonetheless shared.

Pinker discussed in specific terms topics which were illuminated by an approach focused on a ‘sociology of morals’. Family life, as a realm in which desert as well as need were followed as principles of resource allocation, was adjudged in The Idea of Welfare ‘one of the most potent sources of what might be called the “counter-policies” of social welfare’ (Reference Pinker1979: 41). It can be added that neighbours might also be such a source, as Rex and Moore had noted in their study of Sparkbrook in Birmingham. Sometimes neighbours ‘protected’ each other by turning away unwanted visitors, ‘a custom which was not very helpful to social workers’ (Reference Rex and Moore1967: 70). In some detail, Pinker explored the conditions of reciprocity, in particular how the interplay ‘of self-interest and familial, communal and national loyalties places institutional limits on people's notions of felt obligations and entitlement. These loyalties’, he added, ‘will be seen to have a limiting effect if the idea of welfare is defined in internationalist terms, but from an alternative and more conditional point of view they can be seen as providing the moral justifications and the welfare resources by which our boundaries of obligation and entitlement can be extended from the narrowest of familial loyalties to include at least an awareness of national interests’ (1979: 66). Under such scrutiny, however a universalisable ‘welfare ethic’ appeared to be more of an aspiration than a reality (see also 1990: 45).

Arising from Pinker's review of the history of these loyalties and the well-being associated with them in Russia and America, as well as in the UK, two important themes emerged in due course developed in his later work: the salience of access to land and its ownership, and migration. On the first Pinker observed: ‘in Russia the question of land reform dominated all other issues of social welfare. Matters such as the creation of modern forms of social service were of relatively marginal importance not only in what was achieved by the government but also in what was expected by the mass of the population. As late as 1917 eighty per cent of the Russian population were still peasants for whom the ultimate form of welfare was the possession of land’ (1979: 142). On migration, Pinker concluded that for ordinary people emigration was a traditional means by which they ‘tried to provide for their own welfare on their own terms’ (1979: 230). At the level of government action, discriminatory migration policies, together with tariff policies, may be counted as among the means by which ‘modern welfare states continue to enhance the well-being of their subjects’ (1979: 230).

During the 1970s, Pinker had theorised the space on which he hoped substantive sociological research studies, into informal welfare practices and everyday attitudes towards and expectations of ‘formal’ social welfare services, would come to shed light. Much such research was indeed undertaken and published in a short span of time (see Parker, Reference Parker1990; Offer, Reference Offer1999), and on occasion Pinker's discussions were acknowledged as a factor shaping the research (for example, Cecil et al., Reference Cecil, Offer and St Leger1987: 2, 14–15). A new vocabulary had developed around discussions of informal welfare practices, including ‘informal care’ and ‘carer’ (see Twigg, Reference Twigg1994: 290–1). In social policy studies, knowledge was growing about a ‘hierarchy of caring obligations’ utilised in everyday theorising and practice by family members as they negotiated their caring responsibilities, and about the ‘costs’ and ‘satisfactions’ of ‘caring’. It was beyond doubt that caring responsibilities fell mostly to women, though research also highlighted the contribution of young carers and married men caring for chronically ill wives. There was though less research than might have been expected centrally concerned with the interactions which families had with social workers, nurses based in communities and the police; and ‘networks’ of advice-giving and general support remained in general at the margins of study.

Shortly after The Idea of Welfare had appeared in Reference Pinker1979, Pinker served as a member of the team chaired by Peter Barclay which was tasked in 1980 by the Conservative government to prepare a report on the future of social work, published in due course in 1982 as Social Workers: Their Role and Tasks (Barclay Report, 1982). The previous years had seen the performance of social work and the chief employer of social workers, local authority social service departments, become the target of sustained criticism, notably in Brewer and Lait's Can Social Work Survive? (Reference Brewer and Lait1980). At the time, Harry Specht noted that this book had been ‘warmly received by those who support the monetarist policies of the Thatcher government’, and feared it could have ‘a devastating effect on the quality and availability of services’ (Reference Specht1981: 593). In the event, the Barclay Report was supportive of social work but urged the development of ‘community social work’, with a new focus and local mode of delivery: ‘If every client, family and social problem is seen as a need requiring formal social work help or intervention, social workers will always be expected and expecting to do too much. If, however, social workers see and draw out the potential in others, their ability, in conjunction with others, to respond to need will be enlarged’ (1982: 111). In particular, the Report advised that social workers should ‘enable, empower, support and encourage, but not usually take over from, social networks’ (1982: 209).

Pinker declined to sign the main Report. An Appendix, ‘An alternative view’, recorded his reservations. The most disadvantaged, stigmatised and excluded in society could become invisible to ‘community social work’, the privacy of clients and others might be jeopardised and it appeared ‘a romantic illusion’ that locally based social workers alone could ‘miraculously revive the sleeping giants of populist altruism’ (Reference Pinker1982b: 244–5). Later Pinker expanded on his concern over the lack of evidence to justify the Report's confidence in ‘the universal strength of communities and the feasibility of harnessing them to the ends and means of formal social policy’. The research of Philip Abrams (see Bulmer, Reference Bulmer1986) and others on neighbourhoods and care in the United Kingdom indicated that a policy of ‘closer interlinkage between formal services and informal care’ risked the creation of tensions, through the formal sector ‘“colonising” the informal sector’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker1990: 103). Attempting to ‘interweave’ the contrasted nature of ‘natural’ Gemeinschaft and bureaucratic Gesellschaft social relationships might yield mutual incomprehension and dysfunctional consequences (Pinker, Reference Pinker1982a: 12). A similar hiatus had also been pinpointed in one American study sensitive to the sociology of moral categories in ordinary life:

It may be added that at this time a further finding of significance to emerge from research into neighbourhoods and care was that ‘natural helping networks’ (the title of an early American study, Collins and Pancoast, Reference Collins and Pancoast1976) as opposed to care provided primarily by one (often female) individual were comparatively rare, at least in the UK (Allan, Reference Allan1983).

On the foundations of welfare pluralism

Pinker's next book, Social Work in an Enterprise Society, appeared in Reference Pinker1990. It reflects, to a large extent, the development of his interests following his appointment as Professor of Social Work Studies at the London School of Economics in 1978. Some parts of the book focus on topical issues at that time, including the nature of the role of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Workers and its emphasis on genericism (an adequate discussion of Pinker's sometimes controversial contribution to issues around social work education requires a separate study), but there are sociologically and historically informed discussions of several themes of wider significance for social policy studies that cannot be omitted here.

Thus, in respect of the treatment of conceptions of agency and ‘the personal’, Pinker considered that in social administration and social work, difficulties arose over an ‘excessive’ disposition ‘to attribute causation to structural rather than personal factors and to look for remedies in increased levels of equality and expenditure. To suggest that on occasion individuals can be the architects of their own misery would be labelled “judgemental”, “pathologising” or “stereotyping”’ (1990: 44). In connection with the organisation of social work and training for social work, there had arisen, in contrast to the time of their origination in the Charity Organisation Society in the nineteenth century, a marked isolation from industrial and commercial concerns, and an institutionalised hostility ‘to the competitive values of the economic market’ (1990: 34). This isolation and hostility had left social workers with ‘a distinctive set of social market values which reflect an unhelpful sense of moral superiority in the context of entrepreneurship, self-help, the profit motive and capitalism in general’ (1990: 75). Yet participation in economic markets enhances personal freedom, which is ‘intrinsic to the idea of welfare’ (1990: 130). Pinker also viewed both Keynes and Beveridge as including the idea of freedom in their ideas of welfare (Reference Pinker1979: 117).

However, the first of his two chief concerns, mirroring the greater visibility of informal care as a topic, was to examine the growing trend to refer to ‘welfare pluralism’ or a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ (an approach Pinker had described as ‘mercantilist’ in 1979, to signal, with approval, its pragmatic, situation-based approach to matters of welfare). He took these expressions as equivalent, but suggested an important distinction about the underlying idea involved:

The idea, Pinker observed, was thus adaptable to both institutional and residual patterns of normative or ideological thought about social welfare (for Pinker, forms of selectivity and universalism in statutory services were compatible with either pattern of thought, Reference Pinker1979: 7.) Pinker in fact concentrated on the review of policy proposals to ‘mix’ formal and informal forms of care in the Report by Sir Roy Griffiths, Community Care: Agenda for Action (1988), in the process expanding on his reservations over the Barclay Report. The benefit of a wealth of recent research into informal care was now to hand. Chapter 7 of Pinker's book, ‘The quest for community’, was delivered initially as a plenary paper at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, for a conference launching the results from a participant observation study (funded by the DHSS, Northern Ireland) of informal care in a town (Garvagh) in County Londonderry, but it drew into the discussion research from across the UK.Footnote ¹¹ Pinker identified the chief weakness of the Griffiths Report as

The other and related theme of most significance was Pinker's own exploration of his own relationship to the thought of Titmuss. In his Preface to Reisman's (Reference Reisman1977) book on Titmuss, Pinker suggested that Titmuss's polarisation of economic interests and social interests, with social interests regarded by Titmuss as morally superior because of their intrinsic altruism, was misleading and unfortunate. In Social Work in an Enterprise Society he regarded it as prompting social policy analysis to give, firstly, ‘undue attention to the redistribution of wealth and not enough to the creation of wealth’, with social policies thus expected to aim ‘at greater equality . . . based on the assumption that economic growth could be taken for granted’ and, secondly, to neglect the possibility that ‘through a competitive market economy . . . both freedom and welfare could be enhanced’ (1990: 40–1).

Pinker added that, although Titmuss was in favour of ‘community care’, ‘he would have had little time for our present notions of decentralised, participatory community action which must be based on the assumption that equitable policies of positive discrimination and redistribution can be realistically pursued in the absence of firm administrative direction and control’ (1990: 37). Indeed Titmuss in his famous essay ‘The social division of welfare’ (Reference Titmuss1956) had distinguished statutory social services, occupational welfare (work-placed benefits) and fiscal welfare (allowances and concessions through the tax system), but took no account of either the voluntary or the informal sectors of care (Pinker, Reference Pinker1990: 100–1; see also Reference Pinker, Yoder, Jonker and Leaper1985: 101). In fact, in his commitment to an institutionalist philosophy of welfare provision, Titmuss was a welfare unitarist (though within the framework of universal unitarist provision there was scope for selectivity). It was his view that the statutory social services ‘constituted the most important institutional feature of a civilized society because the egoism of the private market alienated people from each other whereas the altruism embodied in the statutory public services united and elevated them’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker2008: 9). As Pinker noted, this was a form of analysis which Titmuss developed in depth in his The Gift Relationship (Reference Titmuss1970). Titmuss was convinced that the state should be the main funder and provider of social services ‘because only the state had the authority to implement, without fear or favour, the redistributive policies that he considered necessary’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker2008: 9). In Pinker's judgement, Titmuss's ‘hostility to the mixed economy of welfare was uncompromising’. It would ‘undermine the principle of equity, increase inequalities and weaken social solidarity’ (Reference Pinker1992: 276). When Pinker later reviewed The World of the Gift by Godbout and Caille, he noted sympathetically their view, contrary to Titmuss's analysis of statutory social services as embodying a gift relationship, that ‘the state as the prime agency of service provision inevitably transforms the gift relationship into “an anonymous circulation network between strangers”’ (Reference Pinker2000: 151). For Pinker, Titmuss had drawn on sociology and economics selectively, mining them for certain theoretical perspectives and empirical findings which appeared to offer support rather than the opportunity to test out his normative commitment to welfare unitarism and its expansion (Reference Pinker2008: 11).

The freedoms and benefits offered by markets and the need to recognise the contextual and conditional nature of altruism in all social life, including statutory services, remained undigested in Titmuss's form of idealist social analysis: the structural composition of his way of thinking focused on the means to the end of what he took to be ‘moral growth’ and the ‘good society’ and seemed to preclude engagement with the everyday production by people in their ordinary lives of what they regarded as their own and others’ welfare (Offer, Reference Offer1999, Reference Offer2006; Mann, Reference Mann2009). For Pinker, Titmuss was adamant that freedom as a value was secondary to a guarantee of material welfare by the state (Reference Pinker and Barker1995a). He was to suggest that Titmuss's ideal of social welfare

The model of formal services delivered through a pluralist mixed economy of welfare, with appropriate regulation and safeguards, thus appealed to Pinker, provided that the ‘mix’ did not extend to familial care being coerced or colonised (Reference Pinker, Yoder, Jonker and Leaper1985: 117). Pinker has often noted the value for his own work of the precedent set by T.H. Marshall (Pinker, Reference Pinker1981, Reference Pinker2006a, Reference Pinker2006b, Reference Pinker and Psimmenos2011) in finding a path between the polarities of collectivism and individualism (and welfare and freedom) with his concept of ‘democratic-welfare-capitalism’ (Marshall, Reference Marshall1972).Footnote ¹³ The underpinning ideas for this reflective normative outlook, echoing John Stuart Mill's philosophical liberalism, to which Pinker added his own emphasis on the sociology of morals, complemented the broader understanding of welfare matters for which Pinker argued, including the scrutiny of the normative preferences of professionals and social policy academics themselves:

This outlook had indeed been a clear feature of the critical comments in Social Theory and Social Policy on both conservative and radical tendencies in intellectualist ideologies (1971: 146). It is not therefore surprising that as the pendulum of political fashion swung away from welfare unitarism in the early 1990s, Pinker focused his attention on those policy analysts who wanted to replace it with a similarly unitarist model based on theories of competitive market individualism. David Green had set out the case for returning ‘much of what we call the welfare state to civil society’, which he saw as the ‘the realm of free choice and conscience as opposed to the realm of government command’ (Green, Reference Green1993: 152–3). In Pinker's view, this claim served to exaggerate ‘the civic virtues of private enterprise and voluntary service at the expense of the public sector in exactly the same way as Titmuss used to exaggerate to the opposite effect' the virtues which are inherent ‘in the long tradition of public service and statutory welfare provision that has its origins in nineteenth-century Britain’ (Reference Pinker1995b: 80).

More recently, Pinker has explored what we may call the necessary conditions in social life for welfare. In a sense, though, this interest in part again harks back to Social Theory and Social Policy, in this case to his concern that ‘public utilities and services’ such as ‘libraries, museums parks and other freely available services’ were routinely excluded from definitions of social policy, but that the distinction was arbitrary ‘if the aim of a social service is the enhancement of individual or collective welfare’ (Reference Pinker1971: 147). A free public transport system, he mused, might even do more for individual welfare and community relations than increases in social security benefits (1971: 150). The point here was that the conceptualisation of ‘welfare’ had to move beyond the then conventional boundaries of social policy studies, even just to understand ‘welfare’ as construed within those normative boundaries (a point Rowntree had made less directly in Poverty and Progress in Reference Rowntree1941 and discussed in his portrayal of everyday recreational activities in English Life and Leisure (Rowntree and Lavers, Reference Rowntree and Lavers1951).Footnote ¹⁵ Once planted, the seed grew quickly. By 1973 Pinker considered that perhaps the ‘most neglected index of popular welfare preference has been the private ownership of land’. While kinship is the first focus of altruism it is predicated on security: the acquisition of property and its transmission across generations (with an associated patriotic sentiment) is a search for security ‘which can only be checked or denied by force’ (Reference Pinker1973: 23). Moreover, as noted when discussing The Idea of Welfare (Reference Pinker1979), he recognised a connection between the possession of land and everyday ideas of welfare. Later he felt, I think judging himself ungenerously, that he had then failed to grasp ‘the connections between the idea of land as welfare, citizenship, sovereignty, nationhood and the impact of wars, notably civil wars, on the growth of citizenship and welfare’ (2004: 7).

Pinker considered now that, while the twentieth century had created the concept of welfare rights, the secure ownership of land ‘has always been a key determinant of status, wealth and the prospect of welfare’ (2006b: 26):

If the secure possession of land is absent, and thus a condition for welfare is not fulfilled, the phenomenon of migration becomes an issue. The control of immigration and the access of refugees and immigrants to the welfare arrangements of the host nation then arise as concerns related to the maintenance of the institutions of welfare in that nation, of considerable interest but probably less noticed than the plight of the refugees and immigrants themselves.

In the most recent years since retirement from academic life, one of the driving forces behind Pinker's commitment to the work of the Press Complaints Commission has been his view that privacy required protection, unless there was convincing evidence to the contrary, since privacy too serves as a condition and source of personal and social welfare (in Deacon et al., Reference Deacon, Lipton and Pinker2010: 66). A full assessment of this aspect of Pinker's contribution to public life, however, would clearly require specialist consideration in a separate review beyond the limits of this article.