This collection of essays in honor of Jose Harris takes up many of the key concepts with which Harris's research is concerned—like planning or citizenship—as well as her methods, such as individual and collective biography. Most or all of them work at the intersection of social, intellectual, and political history that Harris has demonstrated to be so fertile. Many also develop conclusions drawn in Harris's own work. Idealism, a key concern for Harris, is examined in many of the book's chapters. Sandra den Otter examines T. H. Green's idealism and how it interacted with his youthful enthusiasm for empire, producing, over time, a conviction that idealism—with its vision of a community bound by reciprocal ties between its members, and committed to the flourishing of all—could not be compatible with empire. Ben Jackson builds on the argument that Harris made in “Political Thought and the Welfare State,” published in Past & Present in 1992, that in the postwar period, idealism lost ground as a framework within which to think about welfare, and as a way of justifying social security. Jackson suggests that this absence was critical in enabling thinkers on the right, particularly those we might term “proto-neoliberals,” to gain ground in arguments over welfare in the postwar period: they argued that a big welfare state sapped individual vigor and must be residualized. However, William Whyte's chapter cautions against any simple tale of the “demise of idealism.” Whyte shows that though from the 1960s onward universities faced a host of challenges in the form of funding cuts as well as calls for them to be more “useful” to the economy or the individual student's earning power, nevertheless, an idea of the university that derives from the idealist view remains powerful. We might want to think, then, not of the “death” of idealism, but rather of its long “half-life.”

Planning is another key theme of the book: while Brian Harrison surveys different meanings and modes of planning over several centuries, Daniel Ritschel zooms in on the late 1920s, brilliantly illuminating the (hitherto neglected) development of an economically “revisionist” platform within Labour circles in this moment. It was not the catastrophe of 1931 that prompted this development, Ritschel shows; rather, thinkers like G. D. H. Cole, responding to a perceived need for fresh thinking in the face of the slump in the British economy in the 1920s, developed a realistic revisionist platform, including a version of “Keynesianism” and a vision of planning not reliant on large-scale nationalization. The collapse of the Labour government in 1931 and Oswald Mosley's appropriation of these ideas to his new Fascist party repelled thinkers like Cole from this revisionist platform, but they returned to advocating for it after 1936. Ritschel thus shows there was a longer revisionist tradition within Labour circles than has usually been supposed. In the process, he puts Labour's leaders in 1931 back on the hook: it cannot be argued that in 1931 there were simply no ideas available to them other than the prevailing economic orthodoxy of sound money.

A set of chapters take up the critiques of the Beveridge model of welfare developed after 1945, and alternative ways of thinking about welfare developed in these years. Chapters by Jackson, Edmund Neill, Matthew Grimley, and Mark Bevir outline the critiques and alternatives developed by right-wing thinkers. Where Jackson examines the rise of “neoliberal” ideas, Neill looks at how a broad array of alternative Conservative responses to the challenges of the late 1960s and 1970s emerged. Neill emphasizes the relative coherence of Conservative thought in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period when Conservatives tended to agree that the main role of the state should be to ensure individuals, or institutions of civil society, did not impinge on individual liberty. However, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the feasibility of this worldview was challenged by a multifaceted “crisis,” and Neill identifies at least three Conservative responses to this crisis in thinking about the state and welfare state: a “traditionalist” response that argued that a strong state must inculcate traditional morality; a libertarian approach that suggested that welfare had sapped individual morality and that the welfare state must be cut; and a third approach that critiqued consumption and consumerism as well as welfare and viewed the “permissive society” as generating a “drearily conformist and passive” society (174). Thatcherism—which most closely resembled the second of these responses—was not, thus, the only Conservative path forward. Grimley, meanwhile, examines how sociology, which reached a peak in modishness and influence in the 1960s, was critiqued by right-wing thinkers, who distrusted sociology because of its association with student protest, Marxism, radicalism, and support for the welfare state. Long before Thatcher declared there was “no such thing as society,” other Tory thinkers were arguing similarly that the way in which sociology set up “society” as a reified object of study obliterated the importance of individual agency and individual responsibility. These chapters thus illuminate the diversity of Tory thought in the postwar decades and the diverse roots of Thatcherism.

John Davis, by contrast, offers an insight into the critiques being made of “statist” welfare on the left, rather than on the right, in the postwar period, examining the “rediscovery of poverty” that took place in Britain from the late 1950s onward. He argues that a key component of this “rediscovery” was the shift in focus from poverty as a phenomenon of industrial areas to poverty as a phenomenon of urban areas. This growing focus on the multiple, intersecting problems of urban areas led to the development of new voluntary agencies attempting to tackle these complex problems. Yet rather than simply adding to existing statutory welfare services, these new actors frequently challenged the bureaucratic and distant practice of those services. Together, these chapters extend Harris's project of understanding how dominant frameworks of ideas shaped social policy. This book as a whole exemplifies the great dividends to be reaped from following Harris's example in taking seriously the effects of ideas and epistemological frameworks in shaping welfare and economic policy and makes an excellent tribute to her important and wide-ranging work. The chapters that follow the story into the late twentieth century, when welfare was increasingly residualized, demonstrate that it was not only changing frameworks of ideas on the right, but also on the left, which shaped that change.