This book revisits Joseph and Seebohm Rowntree's accounts of the social evils prevalent a century and 70 years ago. It is based on a national on-line consultation with 3,500 respondents, as well as group meetings, discussions and a radio phone-in. The discussions involved people with personal experiences of social exclusion through family breakdown, drug and alcohol misuse, crime and violence (as perpetrators and victims), poverty and homelessness.

Although the concept of a ‘social evil’ seemed to introduce an unfashionable moral element into the evaluation of present-day social relations, it did resonate with both the mainstream citizens consulted and those directly affected by adversity. The former's responses dealt with the themes of individualism, declining community and greed; misuse of drugs and alcohol; declining values; social virtues; family breakdown and poor parenting; inequality and poverty; and apathy, failed institutions and a democratic deficit. They attributed many of these evils to the ineffectiveness of government and religious organisations, as well as the influence of commercial interests, and the growing diversity brought about through mass immigration. The authors who analysed their responses described them as ‘uneasy and powerless’.

Members of the groups of disadvantaged people were less inclined to see individualism as a major evil, but otherwise their interpretations were broadly similar. They were aware of the structural barriers to full membership of those circles, and access to those assets, which allowed the mainstream to gain advantage, though they also recognised individual failings and the organisational shortcomings of official remedies. Their overall perspective was summarised by the authors who analysed their contributions in terms of ‘truncated opportunities’.

The rest of the book consists of comments on these findings. The opening and closing chapters are particularly impressive. Jose Harris's magisterial summary of the changes in the perceptions of ‘social evils’ and ‘social problems’ since 1904 is in itself worth most of the price of the book. She shows how the conception and comprehension of these issues shifted with the tides of economic and social development, and how the political project of the welfare state first promised both rigorous analyses and solutions, and then retreated in the face of globalisation, self-realisation and economic crisis. She also makes interesting international comparisons, especially concerning the strengths of British civil society associations and communities, which offered protection against the evils of the first half of the twentieth century (especially totalitarianism), but which waned, along with other traditional bastions of social order, in the second half.

This final point is echoed in the concluding chapter by Matthew Taylor. He tackles directly the phenomena which haunt most of the other chapters – declining trust and civility, retreat into insecure, segregated ghettoes and (above all) unhappiness despite increasing affluence. His thesis is that all of these reflect a cultural imbalance in British social relations, in which individualism has emerged as the dominant mode, at the expense of hierarchy, equality and fatalistic submission. He rightly points out that the epicentre of the crash, the City of London, demonstrates the extreme form of this imbalance, with supremely self-confident traders neither accountable to their superiors, nor restrained by any shared norms of solidarity and co-operation. On this account, all the other social evils, including the failure of an over-legislating and regulating approach to government, follow from this basic feature of our market-driven, competitive and self-celebrating culture, along with the fragility of any gains in well-being which are achieved.

I found the other chapters of the book a mixed bag. Some of them fail to rise above the regular stream of comment and opinion in the daily and weekly press, agonising about the phenomena uncovered by the research, but not really coming to grips with them. However, there are exceptions.

Zygmunt Bauman is, as always, provocative and original in his chapter on ‘the failure of society’, specifically of collective bonds, and his account of how commercialism erodes emotional relations. Neal Lawson is eloquent on how the search for individual freedom has led us astray. And Stephen Thake is positive and bold in his advocacy of the redistribution of power and resources to local community associations. (He might be surprised to find an even more radical ally in the ‘Red Tory’ Phillip Blond, whose views will eventually either be disowned by David Cameron, or perhaps be the making of him.)

This book is definitely a good read in this strange intermission between the crash and the coming general election, with its phoney war of ideas, in which no side feels free to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. The public consultation reflects confusion, frustration and anxiety, which may – as previous history has demonstrated – be no more than an indication that we stand on the brink of an important new period of reform and change. Certainly, the views expressed by citizens indicate the feeling that the ideas of the 1980s have been tested to destruction, and that it is time for a new direction. The book hints at some possibilities, and requires the reader to think on.