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A professor of social administration at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1950 to his death, Richard Titmuss has often been depicted as an inept critic of economics. With The Gift Relationship (1970), however, he managed to attract the attention of leading economists. Robert Solow (1971) and Kenneth Arrow (1972), for instance, took pains to write lengthy review articles of what they and a number of their prominent peers, such as James Buchanan and Milton Friedman, regarded as a highly significant book. In a subject which has a solid tradition of confining ethical matters to its periphery and which has frequently resisted ideas emanating from other social sciences, it is paradoxical that a book of strong ethical inspiration and uncertain disciplinary origins attracted so much interest. One way out this paradox is perhaps to note that, starting with Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (1965), and accompanying the economic difficulties of the late 1960s, economists began to question the power of the invisible hand of the market in bringing about social cohesion. By the early 1970s the time was ripe for reconsidering the virtues of alternative coordinating mechanisms.

The context played a role in the reception of The Gift Relationship, but it was above all its subject that made the difference. Long before the book was published in early 1971, Titmuss (1959, 1963, 1968) had been a major figure in the debate over the welfare state, and in this capacity had criticized economists for their incomplete notion of what holds a society together and the unfortunate policy prescriptions they derived from it. With his new essay, however, he presented his own conception of social cohesion and social policy by contrasting the British system of blood procurement and distribution, based on free giving, to the partly commercialized US system. Metaphorically, the gift of blood illustrated the consolidation of the social bond, while its sale stood for social collapse. In other words, Titmuss pointed to the dangers of society’s increasing commercialization.

The son of a small farmer and his wife of less humble origins, Titmuss lacked formal schooling beyond the age of 14, and when he joined the Eugenics Society in 1937 it was hardly expected he would end up in academe. Yet, after participating in several of the society’s research projects, including those of the Population Investigation Committee, then headed by Alexander Carr-Saunders, Director of the LSE, he made a name for himself in academic circles. Subsequently, the historian Keith Hancock approached him to work as historian of the Cabinet office, as a result of which Titmuss produced the monumental Problems of Social Policy (1950). Not only did the book secure him the chair in Social Administration at the LSE but it also illustrated the importance of the experience of the Second World War in shaping his ‘vision of good conduct as generalised obligation’ (see Reisman 2004). Based on values of solidarity and social duty, this vision may well have been suitable to describe the wartime and immediate post-war British society. From the mid-1960s, however, it became clear that it was incomplete, as was the vision of those economists who regarded the market as the main, if not exclusive, coordinating mechanism in society.

It is these economists’ ideas and the applications suggested by their allies at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the London-based think tank inspired by Hayek, that Titmuss fought from the late 1960s to 1973 (see Fontaine 2002). He was of the opinion that ‘social growth’ was more important than its economic counterpart, and that a ‘socialist’ social policy – not the invisible hand of the market – was essential to social cohesion. These two ideas were intimately connected. Titmuss used the former to show that the economists’ social indicators were inadequate: the economy could grow economically and still regress socially because negative externalities supplanted positive ones. Likewise, ‘socialist’ social policies stimulated ethical behaviour, which generated positive externalities and averted negative externalities, whereas ‘private’ social policies, as envisaged by the IEA, favoured commercialism, which neglected positive externalities and underestimated negative externalities.

While Titmuss’s criticism that economists relied too much on the invisible hand of the market may have actually applied only to a few of them (Solow 1971), his thesis that too much commercialism undermines the social bond concerned them all. Most economists remained unconvinced, but, faced with Titmuss’s emphasis on the role of the gift in so unusual a setting as impersonal interactions, where they typically saw selfishness as reigning supreme, the economists were forced to contemplate the possibility that ‘a world of giving may actually increase efficiency in the operation of the economic system’ (Arrow 1972, p. 351).

See Also

Selected Works

  • 1950. Problems of social policy. London: HMSO.

  • 1959. Essays on the welfare State. New Haven: Yale University Press.

  • 1963. Ethics and economics of medical care. Medical Care 1: 16–22.

  • 1968. Commitment to welfare. London: Allen and Unwin.

  • 1970. The gift relationship: From human blood to social policy. London: Allen and Unwin.