Understanding Human Need 9781447342021

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Hartley Dean

Understanding human need 2nd edition

Understanding Human Need

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Understanding Human Need Second edition

Hartley Dean

First edition published in 2010, second edition published in Great Britain in 2020 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773-702-9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press and the Social Policy Association 2020 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-1-4473-4198-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4473-4202-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-4473-4200-7 (ePub) The right of Hartley Dean to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol, Policy Press or the Social Policy Association. The University of Bristol, Policy Press and the Social Policy Association disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Gareth Davies/Qube Design Associates Front cover image: Getty Images/oxygen Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

To Joe and Tom (who might read this when they’re older –​but only if they feel the need)

Contents Detailed contents List of figures, tables and boxes Select glossary Acknowledgements Preface to the second edition 1 Introduction

ix xi xiii xix xxi 1

Part One: Understandings and concepts 2 3 4 5 6

The needs of humanity The thin and the thick of need and needing Needs in theory Needs in practice Human need and social policy

13 27 47 71 93

Part Two: Implications and debates 7 8 9

Unmet needs and social disadvantage Articulating needs as rights The politics of human need

Notes Resources References Index

113 131 151 171 173 175 199

vii

Detailed contents 1 Introduction Why is need important? Outline of the book Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

1 3 7 9 9

Part One: Understandings and concepts 2

The needs of humanity Human history Humanisms Species characteristics Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

13 13 17 19 25 26

3

The thin and the thick of need and needing The distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ Thin needs and hedonic notions of well-being Thick needs and eudaimonic notions of well-being Dignity and caring Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

27 27 30 35 40 44 45

4

Needs in theory Classic human individualist theories Social policy perspectives Critical perspectives Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

47 48 58 62 68 69

5

Needs in practice Customs and consumption Social policy perspectives Insurgent claims making Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

71 71 76 87 90 91

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6

Human need and social policy A taxonomy of needs-​based approaches Human needs and welfare ‘regimes’ Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

93 93 98 108 109

Part Two: Implications and debates 7

Unmet needs and social disadvantage Poverty and inequality: the distribution and accumulation of material resources Exclusion and misrecognition: the construction and demarcation of social divisions Dehumanisation: processes of alienation, oppression and exploitation Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

113 114

8

Articulating needs as rights Rights-​based approaches Reconceptualising social citizenship Justice or humanity? Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

131 132 137 145 148 149

9

The politics of human need Reprise A different politics of demand A needs-​first ethic Conclusion/​Summary Challenging questions

151 151 154 159 169 170

x

120 124 128 129

List of figures, tables and boxes Figures 6.1 A taxonomy of needs-​based approaches 6.2 A taxonomy of welfare regimes: their assumptions, principles and priorities 8.1 A taxonomy of currently prevailing rights-​based approaches to human need 8.2 A speculative taxonomy of the historical manifestations of social rights

94 99 135 144

Tables 1.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 7.1

Binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of need Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Max-​Neef’s matrix of fundamental human needs and satisfiers Doyal and Gough’s theory of human need: a summary Bradshaw’s taxonomy of need: an interpretation Expression through participation Development, poverty and inequality in rich and poorer countries 7.2 Social disadvantage as the denial of human fulfilment 8.1 Thin/​formal versus thick/​substantive conceptions of rights 9.1 Diagrammatic summary of argument regarding competing understandings of human need

2 52 56 62 79 85 119 126 133 153

Boxes 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2

Bee and human societies compared The etymological roots of the word eudaimonia Poverty and suffering with dignity The wants and needs of the apothecary and Romeo Ryan and Deci’s three basic psychological needs Deontology and ontology Nussbaum’s list of ‘central capabilities’ Adam Smith on the meaning of ‘necessaries’ The International Labour Organisation’s pragmatic definition of ‘basic needs’ 5.3 Famous referenda: majority self-​interest versus minority needs

22 29 42 49 53 54 57 72 77 82

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5.4 5.5 7.1 7.2 7.3

xii

Brasília Teimosa (‘Stubborn Brasilia’) squatter settlement The Burston Strike School The Speenhamland means-​test and the measurement of need The UN Multidimensional Poverty Indicator (MPI) Social constructions of difference

87 90 115 116 122

Select glossary This book will necessarily discuss an array of technical terms and abstract concepts. To define all of them would require a glossary almost as long as the book itself. Included here, therefore, are short explanations addressed to the different adjectives that may be used to define ‘need’. Even this list is not exhaustive. Insofar as these key terms intersect and overlap, these definitions may help to clarify the connections and differences between them: often terms overlap with or are virtually synonymous with other terms, or else terms can be used in quite different ways. Where other terms have been mentioned in the book these will usually have been defined within the text and their definitions may be accessed via the index. absolute need: Most often used to denote the opposite of ‘relative’ need. It may refer to whatever may be held to be absolutely necessary for physical survival or for minimal human dignity, though as with the term ‘absolute poverty’, definitions of absolute necessity vary. agency need: Used in relation to a person’s need of individual freedom and a capacity for autonomous action. The opposite of individual ‘agency’ may usually be thought to be constraining social ‘structure’, but when used in conjunction with ‘need’, its opposite may sometimes be considered to be ‘vital’ need, thus drawing a distinction between free human consciousness and the determinants of biological life. axiological need: A term used to refer to the need for experiences that have inherent value and that make life worthwhile. It can be contrasted with ‘existential need’, but it may also be linked with ‘ontological need’ when it is concerned with the meaning of that which a person values. basic need: May be used as a synonym for ‘absolute’ need or to denote the opposite of ‘higher’ need. The term generally refers to whatever may be fundamentally necessary for survival and the avoidance of harm. Confusingly, perhaps, it is sometimes also used as a synonym for ‘universal’ need, not so much in the sense referred to later in this glossary but as a way of referring to the elemental needs that every human being has. circumstantial need: A term accorded a specific meaning in this book and which refers to need that is ‘thinly’ conceived and is practically interpreted. For policy purposes, what people need is here judged in relation to what is minimally and morally justifiable in the specific context of an individual’s personal circumstances.

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(Some philosophical texts may use the term more generally as a synonym for what is defined later in this glossary as ‘substantive’ need and contrast it with constitutional need –​a term not used in this book –​namely needs that are in some way socially or institutionally constructed.) common need: A term accorded a specific meaning in this book and which refers to need that is ‘thickly’ conceived but is practically interpreted. For policy purposes, people’s needs here stem from their social nature; to the requirements that attend one’s belonging within a society or community and which are defined in terms of the functions and experiences one has in common with others. comparative need: A form of need defined with reference to any relative deficit established through the comparative analysis of the living standards or the services received in different places, by different communities or by different social groups. One’s comparative needs may be defined with reference to the things one lacks but which other people have. cultural need: May be used to refer to needs which are culturally constituted and stem, for example, from the requirements of a particular religion or belief system, or to needs satisfiers which are culturally relative and stem, for example, from specific social customs or cultural practices. derivative need: Can be used to denote the opposite of ‘basic’ need, but like the term ‘intermediate’ need, it refers to the things people need in order to satisfy more basic needs. Money, for example, is a need we derive from our need to buy food and clothing. discursive need: Need that has been constituted through discourse; through the meanings people generate between themselves when they talk or communicate with one another and through their shared practices and conventions. Need constructed through popular discourse may sometimes be described as ‘socially constituted’. Need constructed though political discourse may sometimes be described as ‘ideologically constituted’. existential need: A protean term with, potentially, a multitude of definitions. It is used fairly conventionally throughout this book to refer simply to that which is needed for human existence, equating broadly with ‘physical’ need and its various synonyms, and it is used in contrast to ‘axiological’ and ‘ontological’ needs. Other users of the term, however, have expanded it to incorporate these and other wider meanings of human need.

xiv

Select glossary

experiential need: Refers to need as it is experienced. The term combines the meaning of ‘felt’ need on the one hand and ‘substantive’ need on the other. expressed need: A ‘felt’ need that has been formulated as a personal or political demand. false need: The opposite of ‘true’ need. The term is used with reference to things people want, demand, or think they need but which are (in the opinion of the observer) not needed. False, ‘artificial’, or ‘manufactured’ need may sometimes correspond to ‘subjective’ need in the sense that it may occur when people are addicted, deluded or misguided, but critics contend that any need that is genuinely experienced as a ‘felt’ need cannot be dismissed as false. felt need: A term that is broadly synonymous with ‘subjective’ need and which refers to needs that are subjectively experienced by an individual or intersubjectively experienced by a group. higher need: Often used to denote the opposite of morally inferior, base or ‘basic’ needs. The concept refers not to luxuries, but to more refined human needs, such as intellectual, creative or spiritual pursuits. inherent need: A term developed throughout this book to refer to needs that are inherent to the human individual not only because she is a biological organism, but by virtue of her very humanity. The notion of inherent need requires a theory or idea of personhood and of what it means to be a person. Such theories or assumptions may well be implicit, but they are usually given: they are established or prescribed abstractly, or from the top-​down. instrumental need: A term that means much the same as ‘derivative’ need or ‘intermediate’ need, in that it refers to things we must have or do not for their own sake but as a means of surviving or avoiding harm. The meeting of instrumental need is a means to an end. intermediate need: A term with a meaning similar to that for ‘derivative’ need in that it refers to the things we need in order to fulfil other more immediate or ‘basic’ needs. In order to be healthy, we need food, water, shelter and so forth. To achieve human autonomy, we need physical security, basic education and so forth. Intermediate needs may well be ‘relative’ in the sense that what is necessary to meet one’s ‘basic’ needs can vary depending, for example, on the climate and the kind of society in which one is living.

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interpreted need: A term developed throughout this book to refer to needs that are constructed or attributed to the human individual by practical interpretation. Interpreted needs may be established by observation or analysis, or through claims or demands, but they are established or articulated concretely, or from the bottom-​up. material need: Best understood as an alternative or synonym for ‘substantive need’, though the term may be used more specifically to refer specifically to the material substances upon which human life depends. mental need: A term applied to psychological or mental health needs or the inner needs of the noumenal self in contrast to the ‘physical needs’ of the human body. natural need: May be used as a synonym for ‘material need’ to refer to human beings’ needs for the products of nature, but more usually as an ‘inherent need’ definition premised upon normative or teleological assumptions about what constitutes human nature. normative need: A term used to refer to needs determined by the normative judgement of policy makers, administrators or experts, including scientific experts and especially welfare professionals, such as doctors and other health professionals, teachers and social workers. objective need: A term most often used to denote the opposite of ‘subjective’ need and which refers to needs that are externally verifiable or scientifically observable. ontological need: The things we need in order to maintain our individual identity, self-​awareness and sense of meaningful being. Ontological need may be contrasted with ‘existential’ need, which refers to what we need merely to exist in a material sense. particular need: A term accorded a specific meaning in this book and which refers to need that is thinly conceived but theorised to be inherent to the human subject. For policy purposes, what people are assumed to need is defined in terms of their objective individual interests and the opportunities they need in order to compete as freely choosing economic actors. physical need: Meaning much the same as terms such as ‘vital’, ‘somatic’, ‘physiological’ or ‘viscerogenic need’, alluding to the needs of the human body. real need: A term that is commonly but loosely used, sometimes to mean ‘true’ need but sometimes ‘substantive’ need.

xvi

Select glossary

relational need: Used with reference to human beings’ needs for human contact, interaction, belonging and/​or love. relative need: Most often used to denote the opposite of ‘absolute’ need. The term refers to needs that are not fixed, but which are determined in relation to the climatic, socio-​economic and cultural conditions in which the human subject lives. The things required to satisfy ‘intermediate’ needs are by definition relative. When relative need is unmet we speak of relative poverty or relative deprivation. social need: A term that is commonly but loosely used as a way of distinguishing between the needs that pertain strictly to individuals and needs that are a matter of social concern: a distinction which in practice –​as Titmuss observed –​is hard to sustain. But the term can also be used to refer to cultural needs. spiritual need: A term that may have either religious or secular connotations. In a religious context it refers to a need for support in the observation of particular rituals or practices and in the sustenance of belief. In a secular context, it refers to the need to realise the ‘spiritual’ essence of one’s humanity (which does not necessarily equate with the ‘material species’ essence proposed by Marx). subjective need: A term most often used to denote the opposite of ‘objective’ need and which refers to the needs people think, believe or feel they have, whether they be ‘true’ or ‘false’. Subjective need, though it is founded on individual experience, is assumed by classical economists, for example, to be objectively observable through the preferences people exercise. substantive need: A term that addresses the substance rather than the process of needing. It is generally used to signify actually existing or ‘real’ need and to capture the sense in which the needs referred to are not merely abstract or theoretical in nature. technical need: Need that is technically created, through the invention of some new or more effective form of good. The term is most commonly used in the healthcare context to refer to forms of medical intervention that can relieve conditions not previously treatable. thick need: This term has been accorded particular significance for the purposes of this book and is used to refer to needs that are optimally defined and that include the things that may be necessary for a person truly to flourish and to share a good life.

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thin need: This term has been accorded particular significance for the purposes of this book and is used to refer to needs that are minimally defined but which include the things that are necessary for a person, with dignity, to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. true need: Opposite of ‘false’ need. But what is true, of course, depends on one’s point of view, so the term may be used equally to apply, for example, to ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ need. universal need: A term accorded a very particular meaning in this book and which refers to need that is ‘thickly’ conceived but theorised to be inherent to the human subject. For policy purposes, people’s needs here stem from their humanity and what is required for human fulfilment. They are defined or negotiated by and through the way people depend upon and participate with one another. Confusingly, perhaps, it can sometimes also be used as a synonym for ‘basic’ need, not quite in the sense referred to earlier, but as a way of referring to the elemental needs that every human being has.

xviii

Acknowledgements When writing a book one incurs debts to a great many colleagues, friends and family members. Special mention in this instance must go to those who read and commented on complete or partial drafts of this and/​or the preceding edition of this book; who in correspondence or conversation have pointed me to sources, ideas or information of direct relevance; who in the course of unrelated collaborations have inflected my thinking in new directions; or who have offered recognition or encouragement for the project as it unfolded. These include: Orly Benjamin, Irene Bucelli, Tania Burchardt, Ulrike Davy, Michael Dover, Tony Fitzpatrick, Ian Gough, Bill Jordan, Mary Langan, Lutz Leisering, Ruth Lister, Lucinda Platt, Camila Souza and David Taylor. I have also benefited from discussions with the many students who over the past 15 years studied my course on Social Rights and Human Welfare at the LSE. I am grateful to Catherine Gray, of Policy Press –​University of Bristol; and to Pam Dean not only for the initial proofreading of typescripts, but for forbearance, support and much else besides. However, insofar as the book exhibits errors and many weaknesses, these are wholly my responsibility: none of these good people are in any way to blame.

xix

newgenprepdf

Preface to the second edition The first edition of Understanding Human Need was written at a time when I was grappling with the ambiguities and inadequacies of concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘well-being’ and in the hope that by focussing on something as fundamental as human need it would be possible to pin down more precisely the central focus of the academic subject in which I work, namely Social Policy. The result was a book which developed an integrative model by which to categorise the main approaches to human need and demonstrate how they are reflected in different sorts of policy goals. It concluded with some discussion of the relationship between human needs and social rights and the politics of needs: themes I went on further to explore in later work. In this second edition, I return partly to fill some of the gaps that I left in the earlier edition, to bring my account up to date, to correct or clarify certain elements of my argument and to improve some of my explanations. But more fundamentally, I want to make a more explicit theoretical contribution regarding the essential nature of human need. I want to re-​address questions concerning ‘humanity’ and need; regarding the constitutive essence of the human species and the essential normative or ethical principles associated with human being. To do this, I have had to restructure the book quite significantly. As human beings we struggle to define our needs but the suggestion with which this book now concludes is that it is by our needs that human beings are defined and define themselves. In this sense, we are what we need. Though it retains elements of the first edition, this is now a very different and, I hope, more interesting book. And, while it has been written partly with social policy students in mind, it now has relevance, I believe, to a very much wider audience.

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This chapter will introduce the reader to the contested nature of human needs, but then: • explain the importance of human need by: ◊ illustrating how concepts of need figure in central, albeit diverse, ways in our everyday lives and everyday discourse; ◊ critically reinterpreting the vital yet contested distinction between absolute need and relative need that continues to dominate and constrain social scientific analysis and debate. • outline the contents of the rest of this book.

This chapter sets out to explain that ‘need’, though it is a central term in social policy, has proved to be an elusive concept. It will demonstrate how understandings of human need may be reflected not only through social policies but also in wider interpretations –​whether commonplace or philosophical –​of the ‘human condition’ (Arendt, 1958). Competing concepts of human need, whether express or implied, are present within all the social sciences. Academic social policy, as an inter-​and multidisciplinary subject, draws from across the social sciences including sociology, economics, politics and elements of psychology, philosophy and much else besides. Need, it has been said, is a concept that is ‘central to social policy making’ (Erskine, 2002: 158). Unfortunately, need is also a concept that is interpreted in a mind-​boggling variety of ways. Des Gasper has described the proceedings of an academic workshop convened in the 1990s as part of a research project on human needs and wants as follows: … it became evident that the participants –​psychologists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists  –​held to no consistent usage of ‘need’, as individuals, not only across disciplines. Yet most of us had read and thought about needs since the 1960s or 1970s. We jumped between different usages almost from one sentence to the next: between … more basic needs versus satisfiers; and verbs versus nouns –​and also between needs as explanatory forces and factors, needs as (pre)requisites, and needs as particular sorts of moral priority claims. (Gasper, 2007: 54)

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Understanding Human Need

Table 1.1: Binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of need absolute objective basic material positive non-​instrumental non-​derivative physical/​somatic physiological viscerogenic intrinsic natural true constitutional inherent thin

… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

relative subjective higher non-​material negative instrumental derivative mental/​spiritual cultural sociogenic procedural artificial false circumstantial interpreted thick

There is a virtually inexhaustible supply of binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of human need, many of which we shall encounter in the course of this book (see Table 1.1 and also the select glossary at the beginning of the book). Many of these distinctions overlap or coincide with each other. Some may be more helpful than others. To pursue them all in any depth would be as exhausting for the reader as for the author. The literature on human need is also replete with a similarly inexhaustible supply of thought experiments and anecdotal vignettes with which to illustrate a variety of philosophical conundrums. They will be used sparingly, if at all, because they can lead readers (and this author) to a sense of despair and inadequacy since nobody has been clever enough to solve every conundrum. In this book we shall attempt to weave the disputed threads into a categorisation of needs concepts and to develop a theoretical proposition concerning the relationship between human interdependency, needs and rights. The aim is to pick out and develop an encompassing conceptual overview of human need. It will be argued that need represents a pivotally important idea and, arguably, the single most important organising principle not only for social policy but in human history and for our understanding of humanity. It is pivotal in the sense that it connects an understanding of our interdependency as human beings with arguments about the claims that we can assert against each other. While it remains conceptually elusive, human need is the idea from which other eminently practical and strategic approaches can flow. Or, to put it more precisely, it is through contests over human need that social policy is made. The concluding argument will be essentially normative: the book will map out how we might

2

Introduction

prefer to think about human need. But along the way we shall be addressing a great many essential empirical questions: questions about what is going on in the world around us and how others accordingly frame their understandings of human need. It has long been acknowledged that ‘the concept of a need involves both “is” and “ought”’ (Thomson, 1987: 109).

Why is need important? It has been suggested already that the way we think about human need is relevant to the ways in which social policies are organised. Functionalist accounts suggest that the analysis of human need ‘provides a clear basis for the analysis of society. And though we should expect the forms of these social institutions to vary among different types of society, some institutions centring about these human need there must always be’ (Fletcher, 1965: 21). It may be supposed that a distinction could be drawn between individual need and social need. The classic riposte to this suggestion was provided by Richard Titmuss: All collectively provided services are deliberately designed to meet certain socially recognised ‘needs’; they are manifestations, first, of society’s will to survive as an organic whole and, secondly of the expressed wish of all the people to assist the survival of some people. ‘Needs’ may therefore be thought of as ‘social’ and ‘individual’ … [but] … no complete division between the two is conceptually possible; the shading of one into the other changes with time over the life of all societies; it changes with time over the cycle of needs of the individual and the family; it depends on prevailing notions of what constitutes a ‘need’ and in what circumstances; and to what extent, if at all, such needs, when recognised, should be met in the interests of the individual and/​or of society. (1955: 62) It has been said that need is only one of several perspectives from which we might define what we mean by human welfare (Fitzpatrick, 2001: 5). However, the goals of social policy, if they are not directly informed as Titmuss asserts by concerns about human need, will indirectly reflect assumptions about human need. Governmental social policy and academic social policy are each preoccupied –​more or less explicitly –​with processes of resource distribution on the one hand and the development of human services on the other. Social policy interventions may entail the distribution or redistribution of resources through the administration of taxes and the provision of cash transfers; the provision of education and training and the regulation of employment; the regulation of land use and the environment and the control or provision of housing; the organisation of health and social care and social protection for people who are vulnerable.

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Understanding Human Need

The significance of needs This kind of provision must be informed at some level by assumptions or principles relating to what human beings (as citizens, customers, subjects or clients) might need. However, there are other candidates for the job of prime organising principle, such as wants or preferences; desert and merits; security and social protection. The contention of this book is that, at root, these all amount to different interpretations of, or approaches to, need. Though philosophers may seek it (for example, Thomson, 1987) there cannot be one true meaning of a word like ‘need’. It is a word with a myriad of vernacular meanings. Consider some of the things that you might say you will need in the course of your own life, or the needs that you consider yourself fortunate to have already met. The important things that might immediately spring to mind are the need for a job; for a place to live; for time to relax; for somebody to love. Our needs as human beings relate to such fundamentals as work, space, time and relationships. Everyday meanings of need might be thought of as falling –​more or less –​into four broad categories: Economistic meanings. These are essentially market-​oriented. Needs are associated with economic opportunities and consumer preferences. Our needs are reflected in the priorities we should be enabled freely to express in terms of the jobs, the homes, the leisure pursuits and personal relationships we might choose. Moralistic meanings. These are essentially self-​centred, yet authoritarian in nature. Needs are associated not so much with what we might want to have, but dictated by the things we have to do; with a necessitous struggle for jobs and homes and such allowable pleasures and relationships that fate and fortune permit. Paternalistic meanings. These are essentially socially protectionist in orientation. Needs are associated with common vulnerabilities and what is required so as to preserve a shared social order. We need safe and suitable jobs, homes, recreation and supportive relations in order to take our proper place within society. Socially reformist meanings. These may be socially liberal or social-​democratic in orientation. Needs are associated with the requirements of a ‘progressive’ liberal society.1 We need decent jobs and homes and fulfilling pastimes and social relations in order effectively to participate in and contribute to society. These suggested meanings are not necessarily systematic. They amount to no more than caricatures of broad, sometimes principled and often complex arguments as to the nature of the human condition. You are unlikely ever to

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Introduction

meet anybody who subscribes consistently to just one of these meanings in the terms just portrayed. Our purpose for the moment is to provide not necessarily an accurate description of what particular individuals, commentators or policy makers think or say, so much as a clearer understanding of the complexity of the issues. In practice these meanings are seldom, if ever, applied in complete isolation from one another. They tend to be muddled together. Approaches are combined –​often unthinkingly but sometimes with subtlety –​in contradictory or complicated ways. This will be illustrated in the chapters that follow. These meanings will be enlarged upon and explored, while introducing different radically humanist meanings of need. People in fact need more than just jobs. Certainly they need the means to obtain a livelihood, but this should not necessarily depend on wages. It is possible, in some parts of the world, to obtain livelihoods without recourse to a cash economy through subsistence farming; or, in others, to sustain oneself as a lone parent or informal carer through social security benefits. Nonetheless, people most certainly need to be meaningfully active in ‘work’  –​ regardless of whether it is paid –​because this is part of what defines our humanity. ‘Work’ might entail labour, but it might also entail caring, studying, artistic endeavour or all kinds of purposeful and creative activity. And human creativity demands not just skills but also the development and expression of personality (in its literal sense). People need more than just a place to live. Certainly they need to be appropriately sheltered from the elements, but space and place are important. People need comfortable homes and a healthy, sustainable environment. People need more than just time to relax. Certainly they need enough time to rest, but more particularly they need time to realise their own creativity; to play as well as rest. People most definitely need somebody to love, and somebody to love and care for them in return. Our humanity, it will be argued, depends on the manner of our interconnectedness and interdependency with others. The absolute/​relative distinction A key debate that has driven a great deal of this complexity concerns a distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ conceptions of need. Is it possible to define what human beings need in absolute terms, or is human need always socially or culturally relative? And if human need is always relative, is there any point in seeking to define it? This has been a critical question for social policy (Doyal & Gough, 1991: Part I). The period of welfare state retrenchment that began in the global North from the 1970s onwards (M. Powell & Hewitt, 2002) has been associated by some writers with a ‘politicisation of need’ (Langan, 1998: 13–​21). Towards the end of the last century arguments about the relativity of human need had developed to the point that the very concept of need had among many policy makers become increasingly discredited.

5

Understanding Human Need

The absolute/​relative distinction is intimately caught up with issues of poverty, deprivation and inequality. A person may be said to be absolutely poor if she is deprived of the necessities of life itself. She may be said to be relatively poor if she is deprived of whatever she might need in order to participate in the life of the society to which she belongs. Villagers in a drought-​stricken region of sub-​ Saharan Africa need food and water. But do relatively deprived families living in inner-​city public-​sector housing developments in the global North really need state-​of-​the-​art-​televisions and high-​end smartphones, simply because some, or perhaps many, of their neighbours seem to have them? As living standards rise around the world, will human needs continue indefinitely to expand? These are questions to which we shall be returning later in the book. For now, however, it is suggested that the absolute/​relative distinction –​whether applied to poverty or to need  –​contains two underlying distinctions. One distinction relates to the extent of human need or needing –​thinking of ‘to need’ as a verb and as a distinctive component of all human feeling and experience. The other distinction relates to the essential or identifiable characteristics of human needs –​thinking of ‘need’ as a noun and as a thing to be named or defined. Insofar as the distinction between absolute and relative needs is concerned with the extent of human needing –​both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense, this raises questions of measurability on the one hand and philosophy on the other. How much do we need and how far do our needs extend? Should human need be minimally or optimally satisfied? Is it enough that we should be able minimally to survive or is it important that we should be allowed, or even encouraged, so far as possible to flourish (Ignatieff, 1984:  Introduction)? Another way of thinking about this –​and one we shall be adopting –​is to distinguish between thin needing and thick needing (Drover & Kerans, 1993: 11–​13; I. Fraser, 1998; and see Walzer, 1994). The terms are, of course, metaphorical, and one of the analogies that has been used to explain them relates to the difference between a thin insipid soup that, though it may be nutritious and wholesome, is not as thoroughly satisfying as a thick rich soup –​skilfully or lovingly made –​which appeals to our sense of taste and enjoyment. It is a distinction between what might respectively be called minimalist and expansive interpretations of need and of needing. When it comes to the characteristics of need, human beings are simultaneously both biological and social creatures. We have biological or physiological needs on the one hand, but we have socially derived needs on the other. In practice, because we are embodied social beings (K. Ellis & Dean, 2000), it can be difficult to draw a line that distinguishes between these two kinds of need. But one element of the absolute/​relative distinction is a distinction between physical sufficiency and social acceptability. We have bodily needs, but our needs have social meaning and significance. Psychological ‘drives’, for example, may be subject to cultural ‘taboos’. We can’t escape from our bodies, but some of the things that define

6

Introduction

us as human derive from our social context; from our inter-​relationships and interdependency with other human beings; from the dynamics of human history and development. Therefore, the second distinction we shall draw is between, on the one hand, needs that are conceptually or theoretically defined –​from the ‘top-​down’ –​ as inherent to the human person and, on the other, needs that may be experienced or practically observed or interpreted –​from the ‘bottom-​up’ –​in the course of everyday lives and processes. The naming and claiming of human need Social policies are concerned with the ways in which human needs are met. And academic social policy is concerned with the critical analysis of that continuing process. What we call social policy emerged during the 20th century with the development of capitalist welfare states in the global North (T. H. Marshall, 1950), albeit that there have been different kinds of welfare state (Esping-​Andersen, 1990) that have reflected different and sometimes conflicting approaches and priorities in terms of their underlying understandings of human need. It is clear, however, that throughout the world –​even within the welfare states of the global North –​needs have been going unmet, and theorists and practitioners alike have sought better to understand and address the processes that fuel the enduring systemic disadvantages that remain evident, most especially in parts of the global South. However, the concept of human need has remained relatively under-​theorised. Attention has been paid to the role of rights-​based approaches to the alleviation of poverty and the prevention of disadvantage, albeit that connections between understandings of human need and the framing of social rights have by and large been ambiguous (but see H. Dean, 2015). Throughout history, human beings have in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of success been finding how to care for one another and to meet their own and each other’s needs. Long before the invention of the welfare state, it was through the processes of naming and claiming needs, the social negotiation of claims and the mutual recognition of needs that human beings have survived. What we now call social policy and the framing of social rights may, in retrospect, be seen as integral to human life and the naming and claiming of human need. The understanding of needs is critical to an understanding of what it means to be human.

Outline of the book The argument sketched out earlier informs the structure of this book and key distinctions that underlie the ideas that are developed throughout it. The book falls into two parts: the first is concerned with concepts and understandings; the second with implications and debates.

7

Understanding Human Need

Part I begins in Chapter 2 with an explanation of the concept of humanity and of the human species’ constitutive characteristics that will inform the approach this book takes to human need. Chapter 3 will draw out the key distinction –​between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ needs and needing. Particular meaning is attributed to the distinction by articulating it with different understandings of human well-being. The discussion draws on classic philosophical arguments and current debates about the nature of ‘happiness’ and what might be meant by human ‘dignity’. Chapters 4 and 5 draw out the key distinction mentioned earlier between theoretical ‘top-​ down’ and practical ‘bottom-​up’ approaches to need. The former relates to needs that are held by philosophers, ideologues and scholars to vest in, or inherently belong to, the human subject; the latter to needs that are understood, inferred or expressed by or on behalf of people themselves. Clearly, the two approaches interact and are related, but it is the ongoing nature of that relationship that matters. Chapter 6 brings the threads of this discussion together by articulating the crudely sketched needs-​based approaches outlined earlier in this chapter with the key conceptual distinctions explored in the intervening chapters; it illustrates how each approach is manifested in different kinds of social policy intervention; and it reflects upon how in the current era recent events and debates regarding welfare and well-being may unfold. In Part II, Chapter 7 firstly revisits debates around the disadvantages that occur when human needs go unmet and the processes by which, throughout human history, advantage has accrued to some segments of humanity at the expense of others. It will consider how this is manifested through the poverty, exclusion, inequalities and injustices that affect human societies and in terms of systemic mal-​distribution of resources and, more fundamentally, the ways in which at every level human needs are differentially recognised and fulfilled. Chapter 8 explores how needs-​based approaches can be translated into or articulated through rights-​ based approaches, and advances a new way of theorising the nature of social rights and global justice. Chapter 9 re-​examines the politics of human need and argues in favour of a radical humanist ‘needs-​first’ ethic. Each chapter concludes with a summary of its main points. This may assist not only student readers but those who wish first to browse the book to determine its principal contribution. Readers interested in a framework within which to situate competing interpretations of need may wish to focus on Chapters 3 to 6. Readers interested in policy implications may wish to focus on Chapters 7 and 8. Readers from across the social sciences and beyond, it is hoped, will wish critically to engage with the radical humanist approach to needs developed principally in Chapters 2 and 9. And posed at the end of each chapter are two ‘challenging questions’: invitations to the reader to engage with the contested and contestable dimensions of the discussions this book presents.

8

Introduction

Conclusion/​Summary This chapter has: • Provided some insight into the complexity of human need as a term that is used in a variety of different and contradictory ways among policy makers and social scientists alike. • Suggested that the idea remains, nonetheless, of central importance. • Broadly identified four of the ways in which human need may be thought about. These have been characterised (for now) as the economistic, moralistic, paternalistic, and socially reformist approaches. • Argued that the essential distinction between absolute and relative needs can be understood in two ways: ◊ first, in terms of a distinction between thin needs and thick needs; a distinction concerned with the quantitative extent and qualitative nature of human need; ◊ second, in terms of a distinction between theoretical (top-​down) and practical (bottom-​up) understandings of need; between the needs that individuals may be conceptualised as having by virtue of being human and needs that are experienced in the course of everyday human existence. • Explained that this book, in developing these arguments, will contend that human need is best understood in the context of human interdependency and as the basis upon which social rights may be constructed and claimed. It will argue for a radical humanist understanding of needs.

Challenging questions 1 . Why should it be difficult to define what human beings need? 2. Can any of the binary distinctions in Table 1.1 be regarded by themselves as meaningful or helpful?

9

Part One Understandings and concepts

11

2 The needs of humanity

This chapter will:

• • •

consider a broad-​brush anthropological account of the history of the human species; discuss the variety of ‘humanisms’: that is to say, the plethora of conceptual approaches and belief systems that in contrasting ways prioritise humanity; present a radical humanist analysis of the constitutive or ‘essential’ characteristics of the human species as a means by which to define its needs.

This chapter sets out to consider what is distinctively ‘human’ about human need. Its conclusion informs the critical stance that informs the rest of the book: for appraising the distinction between that which is necessary to a human being’s existence, and that which is –​in a literal sense –​essential to her humanity (to which we shall turn in Chapter 3): and for understanding the dynamic relationship between human needs whose meanings are framed through prescribed beliefs and/​or reasoning, and those which are framed through direct human experience, feelings and struggles (to which we shall turn in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively).

Human history Recorded history began only with the development of systematic forms of written communication some 5,000  years ago. But biological, archaeological and anthropological scholarship tell us that what we now refer to as the human species, homo sapiens, had by that time already existed on this planet for perhaps 150,000  years. There had been even earlier species of genus homo, some of whom developed the use of tools and fire, and the oldest of which may have first appeared some 2 or 3 million years ago. The homo sapiens brain, however, was twice as large as that of the earliest hominin species, and what set it apart was a process characterised by Harari (2011) as a ‘Cognitive Revolution’, which began to unfold somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago as our species, in small foraging bands, began to colonise pockets of the world, hunting with bows and arrows and sometimes, for example, travelling in boats. While doing so, they began to evolve more elaborate forms of language and communication,

13

Understanding Human Need

and to develop artistic and symbolic modes of representation. Importantly, it appears that the small, generally nomadic hunter-​gatherer communities in which they lived were able adaptively to develop methods of social cooperation well in advance of those of other species (Dunbar & Shultz, 2007; Sahlins, 1974; and see Wilkinson & Pickett, 2018). Some 12,000  years ago, the Cognitive Revolution was followed by the beginnings of an Agricultural Revolution. Human beings started in some parts of the world to settle and cultivate the land; to domesticate both plants and animals. The sedentary societies that emerged began to generate increasingly sophisticated technologies, including eventually the use of metals. And by the time recorded history began some 4–​5,000 years ago, some human societies in certain parts of the world had expanded in size, establishing various forms of government, religion and formalised ‘civilisations’ (Elias, 1978). Such societies became possible, in part because productive technologies made it practicable to feed, shelter and clothe larger groups of people, but also because shared (or sometimes imposed) systems of belief and understanding made it possible to coordinate such processes. The medium of language had made it possible to classify and name, to communicate about and plan access to the palpable or concrete things that people needed for survival. But it also made it possible for human beings to unify themselves around imaginary or abstract things; to create and share legends and myths; to invent and promote shared beliefs in spirits and gods; to define and agree cultural practices, customs, rules and laws. Whereas the elaborately evolved behaviours and habits of their primate ancestors were driven primarily by genetically instituted instincts, homo sapiens had generated and internalised intersubjective understandings of their world, so constructing what might be regarded as ‘artificial instincts’ (Harari, 2011:  181). As this process accelerated, human beings found new ways to exchange information and produce and exchange the goods they needed. Language could be expressed through written script. Produce could be traded with people from beyond the immediate group or community that produced it, not by barter, but using money; a medium of exchange requiring a shared conceptualisation of comparative value symbolised through tokens or coinage. To what extent did these changes constitute human progress? Partial insights into the prehistoric hunter-​gatherer societies of the early Stone Age can be obtained from anthropological studies of surviving aboriginal, indigenous and nomadic tribal peoples, findings from which suggest that the daily existence of prehistoric foragers may have been frugal by contemporary standards, but their ‘wants were scarce and [their] means (in relation) plentiful’ (Sahlins, 1974: 13). Theirs, perhaps, was the original ‘Affluent Society’, in which rules and rights of exchange were governed, it has been suggested, by ‘The Spirit of the Gift’. Though we should not romanticise the quality of life of prehistoric foragers, the evidence suggests that in supposedly more ‘developed’ agricultural societies,

14

The needs of humanity

by contrast, most people had to work longer and harder than the foragers in order to achieve their means of subsistence, their diets were less varied and less nourishing, and their livelihoods were not necessarily any more secure. Certainly, the societies that emerged were more hierarchical. Ruling elites could enslave, exploit or oppress parts of the populations over which they ruled. Kingdoms and empires sought to expand or compete for domination across ever greater portions of the global human population. Whereas human beings had once existed in small self-​sufficient groups, largely isolated from each other, they evolved into a species that was on the one hand uniquely interconnected through language and trade, yet on the other divided by conflicting religious beliefs and/​or territorial allegiances and by socially constructed relations of class, caste or ‘race’.1 As human civilisations of various shapes and sizes evolved, so did human cognition and culturally distinctive but systematic forms of inquiry, learning and reflection as to the nature of the world and the place of our species within it. Classical ‘Western’ philosophy and science evolved in Europe during the Greco-​Roman era (from around two and a half to one and a half thousand years ago), while a more eclectic range of parallel and intersecting ‘Eastern’ philosophical traditions developed across different parts of Asia (for example, Flew, 1989; Harrison, 2013). Significant advances in science and mathematics were made in the Middle East during the Islamic ‘Golden Age’ (between the 8th and the 14th centuries ce). And back in Europe, between the 14th and the middle of the 17th centuries ce, there was a ‘Renaissance’ of scholarly interest in classical philosophical thinking. From this there emerged in the late 17th and 18th centuries ce a hegemonic intellectual movement: the so-​called European ‘Enlightenment’. This movement was associated not only with rapid shifts in political thinking and scientific discovery, but also the invention of an international world order premised on the idea of the sovereign nation state. It paved the way for the birth of ‘modern’ capitalism and, in the 19th century ce, the Industrial Revolution (Hobsbawm, 1962): a revolution that entailed an explosion of new technologies, that afforded global economic and cultural dominance to the nations at its forefront; and which heralded an era of rapid, but uneven, economic development. The concept of economic development has been synonymous with the process of capitalist industrialisation and the creation of unequally distributed wealth (Picketty, 2013), for which the sine qua non is continual growth in the human production of goods and services. Human beings have now established a global market system, driven by finance capital and facilitated by new information technologies, albeit that there are stark contrasts in living standards and the extent to which human needs may be met in different parts of the world (see Chapter 7). To what extent, therefore, is inexorable economic growth good for humanity? Is it perhaps inimical to human needs (Gough, 2018)? The total human population on planet Earth some 2,000  years ago would probably have been no more than 0.03 billion, though by the 1800s ce it would have expanded to around

15

Understanding Human Need

1 billion. But then in just 200  years it rocketed to around 7 billion and is projected to rise to somewhere between 10 and 13 billion by 2100 ce (Bacci, 2012; United Nations Population Division (UNPD), 2017). It is in the context of historical development that matters of social policy and social development come into focus. The dramatic increase has resulted from effects associated with industrialisation, medical and technological advances, increased longevity and rising living standards. It may in time be tempered by declining fertility, but the demands the human population is already placing on the Earth’s natural resources and the environmental degradation, pollution and fundamental changes to the planet’s climate associated with human activity can’t be sustainable without policy intervention (Brundtland, 1987; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2018). We may already have entered a new era, the Anthropocene era, in which the Earth’s geology and eco-​systems have been fundamentally altered by the human species (see http://​www.anthropocene.info/​). The immanent imperative of the evolutionary process is the need for species survival. And yet the human species –​while uniquely capable of comprehending that imperative and of innovating to provide for its needs  –​demonstrates a tendency for self-​destruction: first, because of its potentially fatal impact on the ecology of the planet it inhabits (Lovelock, 1979); and secondly, some would suggest, through its own revolutionary digital technologies. These technologies are impacting, perhaps unstoppably, upon the culture of human societies; not only are they providing new ways of automating the production of tangible goods and services; they are also facilitating the infinite mobility of capital as the intangible store of conceptualised wealth upon which ‘growth’ is postulated to depend. They are capable of generating new forms of artificial intelligence that portend the possibility that human beings may eventually be superseded by intelligent machines (Kurzwell, 2005). Thirdly, we can’t conclude this hasty overview of the human species’ development without some mention of its propensity for violence among its own members and the possibility that it has developed the capacity to destroy itself through thermo-​nuclear war. It must be acknowledged that there is some limited evidence of occasional killings of humans by humans during the prehistoric era of hunting-​gathering societies, including disturbing incidents of both infanticide and senilicide (that may have been, if not necessary, instrumental to the survival of foraging groups). But human history has since, of course, been replete with violent struggles, armed conflicts and wars, and in this respect the species is wholly unique. In the overall scheme of things, homo sapiens is a young and precocious species, that within a staggeringly short period of time has transformed both itself and its natural environment. It has wrought destruction on itself and the planet. But its needs and the ways in which it both succeeds and fails in meeting those needs are a complex function of the essential characteristics of the species itself.

16

The needs of humanity

Humanisms The thumbnail sketch of the human species that has just been presented is one premised on a two-​fold humanist assumption: first, that the human species was not divinely created but has naturally evolved; second, that it is unique and fundamentally different from other naturally evolved creatures. Humanism  –​ or humanisms  –​ has taken a variety of ideological forms, some of which accommodate themselves with religious beliefs and others that claim to assert principles they believe to be somehow ordained by nature, or which they contend to be self-​evident. Humanism can be manifested as an implicit form of human arrogance –​an assumption of superiority over other species and of dominion over the planet and its resources; or else as an explicit quest for a secular alternative to religious beliefs and religiously inspired and/​or supposedly apolitical value systems (see, for example, Cave, 2009). The earliest humanists were to be found among the classical Greek philosophers, and in Chapter 3 we shall pay particular attention to Aristotle’s thinking about human nature and human well-being. The philosophers of the ‘Enlightenment’ era took the thinking of their Classical forbears in different directions; directions that we may associate directly or indirectly with the principal competing ideologies of the modern era that followed (Hamilton, 2003; Harari, 2011; 2017). Liberal-​individualist humanism would become the most enduring modern orthodoxy. Central to its emergence has been ‘Cartesian dualism’: the seminal distinction drawn by Descartes (1637) between the human body and the human mind, and the conception of a person not merely as a natural living organism, but in a very separate sense as an individual thinking being. The emphasis upon essential individuality and freedom of the human being spawned the supposition that it is through reason and the senses that human beings can divine for themselves the universal moral rights and duties that should govern relations between individual members of the species (Kant, 1785; Locke, 1689). Liberal individualism –​premised on empiricist philosophy –​can take many forms, but as will be seen in later chapters, it has been a hegemonic influence within the international world order. It continues to underpin the assumptions of market economics and, as we shall see, a particular understanding of human rights. Solidaristic humanisms, of which there are several, have a more ambivalent attitude to the individuality of the human subject, illustrated initially, perhaps, in the manner that the romantic philosopher, Rousseau (1762), sought to combine the principle of individual freedom and ‘sensibility’ with that of community; with the idea of collective identity, the collective interest and the ‘general will’. Rousseau’s ideas, it is supposed, helped fuel the French Revolutionary demands not only for liberté

17

Understanding Human Need

and egalité, but also fraternité or solidarity. However, the emphasis on solidarity or community would find expression in very different forms of communitarianism: • some conservative, which would seek to preserve elements of the traditional sources of social order and security; • some reformist, which seek to temper the extent to which unfettered individual freedom might undermine cooperation, sharing and substantive equality between human beings; • and some revolutionary, which have sought to establish a form of human society founded (and managed) entirely on strictly collectivist principles. Critical to these kinds of humanism is an acknowledgement that Descartes’ ‘thinking individual’ does not think alone:  her understanding of the ever-​ changing world around her is shaped intersubjectively through her relations with others. And it was supposed by Hegel (1821) that there is something essential to the character of humanity –​some ‘absolute spirit’ or mind2 –​ that drives our shared understandings. This idealist interpretation of the human condition is consistent with a caring and sharing form of social conservatism, as it is with certain religious beliefs. Critics of Hegel  –​most particularly Karl Marx –​adapted Hegel’s insights to argue for social changes that might unlock or realise not some abstract ‘spirit’, but the substantive potential of humanity; its distinctive ‘essence’. During the Industrial Revolution, Marx and Frederick Engels directly influenced the emergence of modern socialism in both its reformist Social Democratic and revolutionary Communist or state socialist variants. Supremacist humanism might seem to follow from a particular interpretation of Darwin’s (1859) theory of natural selection and an assumption that not only have humans achieved supremacy over other species, but also that the fittest and strongest human beings will, or indeed should, achieve supremacy over weaker and inferior members of the species. However, the seeds of this approach had been sown in Hobbes’ (1651) earlier portrayal of human society as a ‘war of all against all’ and it found explicit expression in the views of Nietzsche (1883), who, having proclaimed that God is dead, contended that human beings are primarily driven by their own ‘will to power’. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, of course, was concerned with a natural process, but if human beings are capable of consciously seeking domination over other members of their own species, then it is through war, conquest, genocide and eugenics that the species might supposedly improve itself or else evolve an aristocratic super-​human elite or super-​ race. The most extreme and by far the crudest illustration of this paradoxically

18

The needs of humanity

misanthropic form of humanism is fascism (Harari, 2017: 299–​300). But central to supremacist humanism is the celebration of greatness and the capacity of great men to exercise leadership, impose order and achieve subservience within the competitive jungle of popular society. These different humanisms, it may be expected, exhibit rather different understandings of human need and take correspondingly different approaches to social policy. Social policy both as a sphere of public policy making and as an academic subject is currently –​whether implicitly or explicitly –​informed largely by what Brian Ellis (2012) has identified as a form of progressive ‘social humanism’, which he describes as the ‘moral and political philosophy of the welfare state’. In essence, however, what he describes is in fact liberal humanism, albeit guided by ‘moral principles that are socially derived’. If for the purposes of social policy, however, we are to identify what is distinctively human about our needs, we might wish to re-​visit key elements of our story of the human species and draw out elements first identified by Marx when he sought to define the ‘essence’ of humanity in substantive rather than spiritual terms. The work of distilling this analysis from Marx’s early philosophical work was originally begun in the 1960s by members of the Budapest School (see Pickle & Rundell, 2018), and in particular by György Márkus. The humanist strand in Marx’s thinking (Fromm, 1961; Parsons, 1971) has been largely overlooked or overshadowed, partly because Marx’s broader legacy was in practice diluted by democratic socialism on the one hand, and distorted by totalitarian communism on the other. Dominant approaches to and interpretations of Marxist thinking have too often been confined, in Bauman’s words, to a ‘truncated, shrunk and desiccated version of Marxism’ (2004: 33). For the purposes of this chapter, I shall set out the kernel of my interpretation of what has been, or may be, drawn or elaborated from Marx’s account of the constitutive characteristics of the human species.

Species characteristics The central contention from which we start is the notion of ‘human essence’, which ‘lies precisely in the “essence” or inner unity of the total social development of humanity’ (Márkus, 1978: 63). It represents the ‘ensemble of social relations’; an essence that is neither biological nor spiritual, but precisely human. What characterises the human species and its mode of existence, according to Márkus’ reading of Marx, is human consciousness, work and sociality. And to these three interconnected characteristics should be added the universality and freedom that ‘mark the general direction of the historical progress of humanity’ (1978: 61): or

19

Understanding Human Need

in short, humanity’s historical development. These characteristics, it may be argued, define the human species in relation to other species and in relation to the natural world. But they also define each member of that species as a generic being. We shall consider each in turn.3 Consciousness The consciousness that characterises the human species is something beyond mere sentience. Around perhaps 70,000 years ago, the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ referred to earlier witnessed the beginnings of thinking: a form of consciousness that made uniquely human action possible in the sense that it is action that has purpose and meaning to the actor; and an intersubjective awareness on the part of members of the species as to their selfhood and identity in relation to the natural world and to each other. It is social being or ‘sociality’ (which we shall discuss further on) which shapes human consciousness. Descartes’ contention that conscious thinking was essentially independent of bodily functions fuelled an enduring debate concerning the ‘mystery of consciousness’ (J. Searle, 1997). It is a debate that continues to divide scientists and philosophers. Is thinking and awareness of our own existence no more than a neurological activity unique to the human brain, or does it entail something more essential about a human being compared, for example, with a highly trained and emotionally intelligent dog on the one hand, or a highly sophisticated and artificially intelligent robot on the other? Marx’s answer was that ‘Thought and being are indeed distinct, but they also form a unity’, insofar as an individual’s consciousness is ratified or ‘confirmed’ through her ‘species consciousness’ (1844: 351). Species consciousness was more than the capacity for passive contemplation, or the capacity for reason alone, but the capacity for ‘sense activity’ (Marx, 1845b: 82): for reflexivity, rather than mere reflection. Consciousness is the dynamic relationship between thinking and being that characterises human action and therefore human history. Marx’s understanding of the Agricultural, Scientific and Industrial revolutions was focused on the unfolding of the ‘human essence of Nature and the natural essence of Man’ (1844: 355). In the process of harnessing nature for the conscious purposes of the human species, human beings have begun to further their species being, albeit –​as is observed earlier –​in ways that have often been suboptimal, self-​destructive and unsustainable. The greater part of humanity remains thereby ‘self-​alienated’. The potential of this unique species has been systemically constrained. But central to humanity’s capacity as a species is the consciousness that allows its members, under the right conditions, autonomously to shape their actions. Consciousness is the means by which a human being has a personal and an intersubjective awareness of her identity; seeks meaning in the world around her and in her relationships to others; and can critically engage with that world in conjunction with others.

20

The needs of humanity

Work It follows that conscious human activity, or what we might call ‘work’, is equally definitive of human essence. However, the activity valued two and a half thousand years ago by the patrician elite of ancient Athens, was to be distinguished from necessary physical labour upon which human society as a whole depends. Such labour was performed by slaves or peasants, who were not recognised as sufficiently civilised, nor therefore, as fully human. The rise of industrial capitalism, it was supposed, portended the final end of slavery and of feudal serfdom, since productive labour power became a commodity to be voluntarily bought and sold under free market conditions. The dominant form of ‘work’ –​both physical and intellectual –​began to assume the form of wage labour. For Marx, all forms of work –​whether materially productive or socially reproductive –​entail human self-​realisation, and the essence of work lies not in its exchange value, but in its dynamic capacity to fulfil the needs of the human species (Heller, 1974). For Marx, all work encompasses the uniqueness of the human species’ metabolism with Nature. Work represents the human species’ symbiotic appropriation of natural resources and its manipulation of natural forces. He applied the term stoffvechsel (best translated as ‘social-​ecological metabolism’) to define this fundamental condition of human existence (1887: 183–​4). However, even in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, Marx recognised that certain human interactions with nature could have counterproductive consequences, and he foresaw that a ‘metabolic rift’ would be occasioned by the capitalist mode of production (see J. Foster, 1999). And wage labour as a distinctive form of work could be an alienated rather than a self-​affirming activity. Most recently, in the late modern era, it has been suggested that the managerial ethos associated with even the best-​rewarded employment can be corrosive of the human character (Sennett, 1998), while a great deal of employment  –​especially that which is organised informally –​is poorly rewarded and chronically precarious (for example, Standing, 2011). But the manner of human beings’ metabolism with Nature as opposed to that of other species is that it is socially, not naturally, organised and reproduced (see Box 2.1). We shall return to the subject of human sociality in a moment, but if we expand our understanding of work as human activity that lies beyond wage labour, it extends to the entire arena of social and cultural reproduction as well as to the realm of political engagement. It includes care work –​which in turn includes care for children and for frail, sick or disabled adults; creative endeavour –​ including artistic expression, sporting and recreational activity undertaken for its own sake; all forms of study, learning and scholarly activity; engagement in voluntary and community activities as well as engagement in formal politics. Work is activity. It is quite simply what human beings do. It is the realisation of their species being and, whether or not it is materially productive, it is, potentially and in essence, the expression of human creativity.

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Understanding Human Need

Box 2.1:​Bee and human societies compared The fable of the bees Bees and humans are alike in that both species appear to be ‘socially’ productive. The similarity struck a certain Dr Bernard Mandeville, who in 1705 wrote a poem, subsequently entitled The Fable of the Bees. The fable concerned a hive of bees which collectively decided more closely to emulate human behaviour, such that individual bees by pursuing their own selfish ends succeeded through relentless and unprincipled competition in incidentally meeting the needs of others. The result was an astoundingly efficient and productive hive. But then one day the bees were introduced to certain aspects of Christian teaching and Stoic philosophy, and they decided they should henceforth abandon self-​interest and acquisitiveness and devote themselves to honest and peaceful living. The result was disastrous for the productivity of the hive, and the colony dissipated. The moral was that ‘greed is good’; a belief echoed later in the 18th century in the economic liberalism of Adam Smith and by many more recent neo-​liberal ideologues.

The bee and the architect A rather different thought occurred to Karl Marx who in his celebrated work Das Kapital reflected upon what it is that makes the productive activity of a human being distinctively human: A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (1887: 178) Marx was not commenting on the imaginary political economy of a beehive but demonstrating that the difference between bees and humans is that the latter have a conscious purpose to their work and, by implication, they have the capacity to change what they do. An architect, unlike any bee, might choose to make an octagonal as opposed to a hexagonal structure or to change the course of architectural history by constructing something radically new.

Are bees ‘social’? Likening a bee colony to a human society is anthropomorphism. A bee colony is in some ways best understood as a single biological organism. It is natural, not social. A human society is an association of interdependent but autonomously conscious beings and is axiomatically social. There is a complex division of labour among the bees within a colony, but this is a natural not a planned phenomenon. The colony is established around a single ‘queen’ or egg

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The needs of humanity

layer. There are male ‘drones’, which can fertilise queen bees (and will die having done so) but otherwise play no part in the life of a colony: redundant drones are expelled from the colony at the end of each season. The multitude of infertile female ‘worker’ bees are divided between ‘nurses’ (who care for the queen and the larvae) and ‘foragers’ (who go in search of pollen), but these roles are determined not by choice or command but by epigenetic tags. This is an arrangement that has evolved over millions of years and is unchanged even by human domestication. The individual worker bees that drive a hive’s production may exhibit genetically determined patterns of cooperative behaviour, but their functioning is not socially ordered, as in a human society.

Sociality Aristotle, famously, defined the human being as a zöon politikon, a term usually translated as ‘political animal’, though, in historical and etymological contexts, it might also translate as ‘social animal’. Aristotle’s intention was to distinguish human sociality from animalistic herd or pack behaviours. Marx would later observe that ‘the human being is in the most literal sense a zöon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal that can only individuate itself in the midst of society (1857: 84). The concept of sociality elicited from Marx’s writing by Márkus (1978:  32–​5) has two interconnected components, Gemeinwesen (alluding to the communal character of human life) and Gattungsleben (alluding to the generic socio-​historic shaping of human life). Human life has a communal character in the sense that the human individual is not, and can’t wholly be, the isolated irreducible atom of liberal social contract theory:  she is an inherently vulnerable, interdependent creature (for example, Turner, 2006). It is not mere ingenuity, but socially organised care and collaboration that have allowed human beings to survive and flourish despite their limited stature and strength relative to other more physically powerful species and often in spite of adverse natural and climatic conditions. Human beings’ sociality is founded on a loyalty to one another, ‘clinging together against the dark’ (Rorty, 1982: 166). But human beings are also generically social in the sense that ‘clinging together’ is made possible, as we have seen, through shared language, customs, institutions, knowledge and beliefs –​all of which are dynamically socio-​historically constructed and contested; and which, through social or ‘interpsychological’ processes, shape the personal development of every human being (Vygotsky, 1978). From a different perspective, Hannah Arendt has observed that a life not lived among other humans is not a human life. She draws on Hegel in asserting that significance of mutual recognition between human beings ‘as builders of worlds or co-​builders of a common world’ (1958: 458). In clinging together against the dark, it is upon the struggle for the mutual recognition and the achievement of

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Understanding Human Need

sociality that humanity depends. A recent and influential contribution to the philosophy of recognition debate has been provided by Axel Honneth (1995), who discusses three modes of recognition upon which worthwhile human lives depend: • Love. It is through intimate relationships that we discover ourselves and who we are; and by which we establish and affirm our self-​identity. • Solidarity. It is through participation and engagement with others in communities or social groups that we discover what it is that we can do; and by which we establish ourselves as actors, with shared collective identities. • Rights. We shall consider the relationship between human needs and socially constructed rights in Chapter 8. But the point for now is that it is through exercising our own and respecting others’ rights that we are able mutually to engage with strangers and more distant members of our species. Sociality is a constitutive characteristic of an individual human’s species being in the sense that she is shaped through, and depends for, her identity upon her immediate and historical social context. A human’s being is realised though her mutual interdependence with other human beings. Human sociality is realised and sustained through love, solidarity and rights. Historical development Human beings, unlike any other species, make their own history (once again, see Box 2.1). When Marx asserted that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’ (1845b: 84) his appeal was to the everyday reality of human beings’ continuing and ever-​evolving struggle for a better life, for self-​fulfilment, for ‘moral progress’ (A. Gilbert, 1992) or emancipation. His famous assertion was a riposte to Feuerbach’s (1841) characterisation of belief in God as an idealised projection of the material or natural essence of humanity itself. Marx effectively adopted and adapted the notion of human essence by treating it not as a mere construct or interpretation, but as an historical reality; not as an explanatory insight but as the constitutive driver of human history. According to Márkus, by referring to the ‘human essence’ Marx was referring to ‘… those characteristics of the real historical existence of mankind which made it possible to comprehend history as a continuous and unified process that has a developmental tendency’ (1978: 61). The human essence, therefore, is not invariant and inherent to the individual human, but dynamic and historically constitutive of the species (see, for example, Margolis, 1992). Humanity’s conscious social being and engagement in material productive self-​ activity provide the substantive dimensions of an encompassing and continual developmental process that is concerned with the realisation of the human essence;

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The needs of humanity

a realisation that can only be achieved by direct human intervention under actually prevailing social and material conditions. As a species being a human is defined and constrained not merely by nature, but by her historical context. Her world may be shaped around her by the state, laws, religion, ideology, culture and customs, but these things have been created by humans and can and most certainly will be changed by humans: a process in which others might participate. Her own actions have meaning not only for her and those around her, but also potentially for the processes by which her species might survive or flourish. Human beings, uniquely, have the capacity to contribute to an historical process of species development; to have a purpose of their own making; to participate in defining the future, rather than passively replicating the past. The significance of this will, I hope, become clearer in Chapter 9. Humans are vulnerable and needy beings, who yet make their own history. That history has unfolded as a continuing tale characterised by struggles to fulfil not only the need for material survival as a species, but to realise the dynamic essence of humanity; to fulfil not some naturally ordained purpose, but essentially human purposes. These have been on the one hand cooperative struggles with Nature, but on the other, competitive struggles between one another. In the chapters that follow, it will be argued that human needs are constructed through the social determination of human purposes. It may be concluded from the earlier account that the determination of human purposes (and thereby our needs) has been and continues to be contested. Our needs and purposes may be prescribed by prophets, priests and philosophers or by despots, leaders and ideologues; or they may be named and claimed in the process of day-​to-​day social existence and human being.

Conclusion/​Summary This chapter has endeavoured to address what it means and what is needed to be a human being. To that end, the chapter has: • Discussed the history of the human species. In relation to the age of the Earth, the origin of the Homo Sapiens species is recent, but its development has been rapid and its impact has been immense. Individually, it is a physically frail and vulnerable species, but humans’ cognitive abilities and capacity for social organisation have enabled the species to dominate (with adverse environmental consequences). Demographically the species has flourished, though the fortunes of different parts of the global human population have varied. The advantages associated with new agricultural, industrial and information technologies and evolving forms of social order and governance have been unevenly distributed both within emerging centres of civilisation and between different parts of the world. Relationships and competition for resources, territory or power

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Understanding Human Need

within and between different human societies have been often conflictual and sometimes violent. • Explained different kinds of humanism. For much of human history, human beings sought the meaning of their own existence and that of the world around them through mythological or religious beliefs. But some while before the scientific discovery of evolutionary processes, people began to reflect in secular terms upon the distinctive nature of the human species. It is now generally accepted that human beings were not created in any literal sense by some divine being or supernatural powers, but evolved naturally and may or must be respected, protected or recognised as such, albeit that this can be achieved in different ways, of which we have delineated three:  liberal-​individualist; solidaristic (which may be inflected in conservative, reformist or revolutionary directions); and supremacist. Each of these particular humanisms understands the human being and her needs in a different way. • Offered an account of the human species’ essential characteristics: a humanist approach developed in part from the early anthropological insights of Marx. Four intersecting and interdependent characteristics of the human species are identified:  its form of consciousness; its engagement in creative ‘work’; its sociality and social interdependence; and its self-​defining historical development. These characteristics are fundamental to and constitutive of the essence of humanity, whose historical potential has perhaps still to be fully realised.

Challenging questions 1. What is it about human needs that make them axiomatically or essentially human? 2. What defines humanism and what, if anything, do different kinds of humanism have in common?

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3 The thin and the thick of need and needing

This chapter will:

• • •

develop a discussion of what may be called ‘thin’ needs, connecting them with ‘hedonic’ philosophical ideas of well-being; develop a discussion of what may be called ‘thick’ needs, connecting them with ‘eudaimonic’ philosophical ideas of well-being; consider, in light of these discussions, competing conceptions of human beings’ need for ‘dignity’ on the one hand and ‘care’ on the other.

This chapter will introduce more fully the particular distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ conceptions of human need first touched upon in Chapter 1.

The distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ The distinction we have drawn between thin and thick interpretations of need and needing is similar to that once made by Kate Soper (1993). And it is related in a more general sense to distinctions between absolute and relative need; between basic and ‘higher’ needs; between vital needs and agency needs; between procedural and substantive definitions of need; or between what people need to survive as opposed to what they need to flourish. But the distinction we are making here also resonates with that which ethnographic anthropologists make between thin and thick descriptions of human life (for example, Geertz, 1973). We should not assume that thick interpretations are always better than thin ones: they may be richer, subtler, more complex, but will not necessarily result in just outcomes, and they are no less likely than other interpretations to be misguided. Michael Walzer (1994) draws on the same idea to distinguish between thin and thick moralities. He makes it clear that, in a pluralistic world, thin (or ‘minimalist’) moralities are important not because they necessarily lay the foundations for thicker (or ‘maximalist’) moralities, but for the contribution they make to different forms of human understanding and the pragmatic possibilities they create for agreed action among people with different moral beliefs. Insofar as there clearly is a moral

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Understanding Human Need

dimension to understandings of human need, this captures one of the ways in which we can consider the plurality of meanings attaching to concepts of need. The meaning this book is seeking to bring to the distinction between thin and thick can most helpfully be achieved by linking it to yet another concept connected to human need; that of human well-being. There is a distinction to be made between being ‘well enough’ and being ‘very well’. To be well enough is to be satisfied with what you can have and do in life. To be very well is, perhaps, to be ‘truly’ fulfilled as a human being. To be ‘not well’ implies some kind of deprivation. Significantly, of course, one can’t be ‘excessively well’: that would be a contradiction in terms. The notion of well-being is capable of invoking not just practical, but moral or ethical considerations about the extent and the limits of human need; not only a ‘thin’ conception of what the lives of human beings necessarily do entail, but also a ‘thick’ conception of what a human life ought to, or potentially could, entail. Needing equates on the one hand with existing and on the other with being: that is to say, it has both existential and ontological meaning. Needing equates on the one hand to what a human being requires to lead a tolerable or even contented life in the social and environmental context in which she finds herself and on the other what she might need to live a reflexive and purposeful life. And different meanings –​as will be seen –​can have different implications for priorities and judgements when it comes to the recognition of substantive needs. One recent introductory textbook has defined academic social policy as the study of human well-being or, more particularly, the social relations and systems that promote or impair human well-being (H. Dean, 2019: 1). ‘Wellbeing’, though hardly a new concept, has become yet another in a succession of fashionable, insightful, yet slippery concepts relevant to human need (for example, Gough & McGregor, 2007; Jordan, 2008; B. Searle, 2008). The advantage of well-being as a term is that it can turn our attention to the positive aspects of social policy, as opposed to negative aspects relating to the management of social problems. It is untainted by the pejorative connotation that attaches in certain quarters to the term ‘welfare’ (Daly, 2011). It also places the emphasis on human ‘being’ as opposed to ‘having’ or ‘doing’ (Fromm, 1976). It has been acknowledged nonetheless by Gough and McGregor that ‘wellbeing is still a novel category in applied social science, such that no settled consensus on its meaning has yet emerged’ (2007: 5). Well-being can be defined in relation to its opposite, depending on just how the opposite is conceived. Gough and McGregor (2007) define well-being as the opposite of ‘ill-​being’ or poverty. Jordan (2008) goes so far as to define it as the opposite of ‘welfare’ in the sense attributed to the term within neo-​liberal discourse:  well-being he sees as the realisation of what he terms ‘social value’; welfare as the realisation of individual utility. Taylor (2018) similarly juxtaposes utilitarian notions of subjective well-being with relational or intersubjective notions of well-being. These suggestions illustrate the distinction that I am characterising as that between thin and thick conceptions of human need.

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The thin and the thick of need and needing

This brings us to the essence of the fundamental distinction between the ‘hedonic’ and the ‘eudaimonic’. The etymological origins of these two terms are to be found in classical Greek philosophy. Hedonism was concerned with pleasure; eudaimonia with spiritual well-being (see Box 3.1). The Socratic tradition recognised both, but the traditions have diverged. The Epicureans supposed that a good life entailed a justly moderated pursuit of aesthetic pleasure (mental as well as physical) and practical avoidance of pain or discomfort (see T. Fitzpatrick, 2018). Aristotle (c. 350 bce) contended that leading a good or ethical life means more than pleasure-​seeking; it entails a quest for virtue and the self-​realisation that comes through social engagement, civic duty and creative activity (see also Fitzpatrick, 2008: Ch. 4; MacIntyre, 2007). It has been attempted elsewhere (H. Dean, 2008b) to argue that the hedonic-​eudaimonic distinction is reflected in the different ways in which post-​Western Enlightenment concepts of citizenship and associated approaches in social policy have been constructed. This chapter will extend that argument further.

Box 3.1: The etymological roots of the word eudaimonia Historically speaking, the word ‘daimon’ (or its derivatives, such as daemon or demon) has referred:

• •

either to what might be called a person’s own ‘soul’ or their true or ‘noumenal’ self; or else to an independent ‘spirit’ -​whether good or bad –​for example, a guardian angel on the one hand or an evil incubus on the other.

During the last few hundred years, it is this last-​mentioned imagery –​of the evil demon –​ that has tended to hold sway. However, in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ children’s book trilogy (Northern Lights [1995], The Subtle Knife [1997] and The Amber Spyglass [2000], published by Scholastic Ltd.) each of the human characters to be found living in a fictional world, parallel to our own, has a ‘daemon’ in the form of an animal familiar. Such daemons reflect or embody the noumenal self of the person to whom they are uniquely attached. They are essential to the integrity of that person as a human being and accompany her or him throughout that person’s life. This is a contemporary example of a way of imagining our daimonic existence. The prefix ‘eu’ implies ‘wellness’ or ‘goodness’ and so exposes the supposed ‘spiritual’ dimension of our human existence to moral judgement as to the nature of human virtue. Axiomatically, this frames the person in her social context. Through the concept of eudaimonia this book will not concern itself with the many religious interpretations

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Understanding Human Need

of spiritual well-being, but with secular interpretations bearing upon the social context through which personal identity and the human ‘self’ are ethically or morally constituted.

We are seeking here to drive the analysis deeper. Recalling Titmuss’ assertion (cited in Chapter 1) that no division can be made between ‘individual’ and ‘social’ need, the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ need that we explore in this chapter embraces the axiomatic connectedness of the individual and the social, while nevertheless examining differences in conceptual emphasis. That which is thin and hedonically conceptualised is focused upon individual subjective experiences of needing. That which is thick and eudaimonically conceptualised is focused on the relational and intersubjective context of needing.

Thin needs and hedonic notions of well-being Mention was made in Chapter  1 of everyday ‘moralistic’ and ‘economistic’ meanings that may attach to human needs. As to the former, these are premised at root on the ‘thin’ morality characterised by Hobbes’ (1651) notion of society as a ‘war of all against all’ and the minimum necessary restraints that should be imposed upon the freedom of the individual in pursuit of her own hedonic wellbeing. At their most extreme, such meanings may become fundamentally asocial and/​or misanthropic. They imply that a failure to achieve self-​sufficiency and to meet one’s own needs is morally blameworthy (for example, Smiles, 1859). Understandings of this nature, which may in practice marginalise human need, have a residual influence within social policy; an influence that may gather in significance with the global rise of right-​wing populism (Grayling, 2017; and see discussion of ‘supremacist humanism’ in Chapter 2). As to economistic meanings, we shall see in Chapter 4 that if the human being is regarded as a utilitarian subject or as a market actor her needs may be understood in terms of her objective interests or her subjective preferences, respectively (and see also the discussion of ‘liberal-​individualist humanism’ in Chapter 2). These are ‘thin’ understandings in the sense that the human being is abstractly construed as a calculative actor with, at best, incidental regard for her inner feelings or her social identity. Such understandings are premised on assumptions about the nature of utility on the one hand and of human happiness on the other. From utilitarianism to welfarism The hedonic approach to human well-being found expression in the 19th century in English utilitarianism. And utilitarianism found its clearest expression in the work of Jeremy Bentham. As Hobsbawm has put it, arithmetic was the fundamental tool of the era and for Bentham and his followers, particularly:

30

The thin and the thick of need and needing

Happiness was the object of policy. Every man’s pleasure could be expressed … as a quantity and so could his pain. Deduct the pain from the pleasure and the net result was his happiness. Add the happiness of all men and deduct the unhappiness, and that government which secured the greatest happiness for the greatest number was the best. (Hobsbawm, 1968: 79) Such a calculus could by implication justify inflicting disutility (that is, pain) upon any who threatened the happiness of the majority. So it was that in England a Benthamite approach to social policy resulted in the creation of the Victorian workhouse and the principle of ‘lesser eligibility’ (D. Fraser, 2017). The workhouse was deliberately contrived to be a place of wholesome horror compared even to the hardships endured by the poorest self-​sufficient labourer. None but the most desperate would seek relief on such terms. In this way the pressure upon the destitute to be self-​sufficient was maximised, and the cost of Poor Rates (a tax borne by property owners) was minimised. The misery of the pauper would promote the greater happiness of the population in general (and property owners in particular). This represents a draconian illustration of utilitarian or ‘consequentialist’ (for example, H.  Bochel et  al, 2005:  197–​8; Fitzpatrick, 2008) social policy. Nonetheless, it encapsulates founding elements of a ‘welfarist’ approach that continues more widely to inform social policy (Jordan, 2008). Welfarism here is taken to refer to a particular kind of thinking that assumes that social policy intervention should be judged by its aggregate effects, rather than the well-being of any particular individual. It is also premised upon certain assumptions about what motivates people: pleasures or rewards provide incentives; pain or punishment provide disincentives. Policy may be used to induce or to reinforce the behaviour most likely to generate beneficial overall outcomes (see, for example, Baddeley, 2017; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). The global North in the 20th century witnessed the emergence of welfare states that began to make systematic provision for meeting ‘welfare’ needs, including healthcare, education, housing and social security. But rights to welfare came with strings attached. Entitlement to various kinds of welfare were and can still be subject to the good character, the good behaviour or the healthy lifestyles of recipients; or expressly conditional upon the recipients’ participation in training or work experience, or upon ensuring their children attend school. The extension of state administration into the field of welfare extended its capacity to control people’s lives in the cause of the greater good (Garland, 1981), a development that with the development of Conditional Cash Transfers now extends to parts of the global South (Leisering & Barrientos, 2013). As we shall see in Chapter  4, the political calculus of utilitarianism has its counterpart in welfare economics, which has attempted to bring neo-​classical economics to bear upon the analysis of human well-being; and the principles of

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Understanding Human Need

cost-​effectiveness analysis to bear in public policy making. This has, for example, been especially relevant in healthcare policy, especially when new treatments are generated by technological and medical advances, giving rise to what has been called ‘technical need’ (Forder, 1974). But the cost of such innovation may exceed the resources available. When public access to life-​saving procedures is to be rationed, difficult decisions have to be taken. The best known example of how this might be done is the system of QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) developed amid some controversy in Oregon, US (and once considered for use in the UK) (H. Bochel et al, 2005: 203; A. Williams, 2005). QALYs can be used to evaluate whether the cost of surgery or some other form of healthcare intervention is justified; whether a person’s life is ‘good enough’ to be worth saving. They indicate the length of time a patient can expect to achieve an acceptable quality of life as a result of treatment, however, the measure of quality of life –​the Rosser Index –​is a classic example of a hedonic calculus. It evaluates degrees of disability in one dimension (ranging from ‘none’ to a ‘state of unconsciousness’) and degrees of distress in another (ranging from ‘none’ to ‘severe’) in order to compute a matrix score (ranging from 1.0 for ‘healthy’ to 0.0 for ‘dead’) (Gudex, 1986; Kind et al, 1982). Underpinning these approaches and associated debates in medical ethics lie fundamental questions regarding the ‘value’ of human life, not least where, for example, this extends to judgements about abortion, embryo research, euthanasia and assisted dying (Harris, 1985). Where such judgements are not driven by religious convictions, they appear within medical circles to draw upon empiricist conception attributed to Locke, who contended that personhood requires no more than that the individual ‘can consider itself the same thinking thing in different times and places’ (Locke, 1689), from which Harris concludes that for ethical purposes a person whose right to life must be respected ‘will be any being capable of valuing its own existence’ (1985: 18), a definition which Harris concedes might apply not exclusively to human beings, but potentially to alien life forms or intelligent machines! Most significantly for our purposes, however, this is a definition that restricts the understanding of human consciousness to the sensibility of an individual being and implies what is here defined as a ‘thin’ understanding of needing and of the human condition. Hedonic approaches to well-being have informed a succession of health-​related quality of life measures that have in the first instance related wellness primarily to healthiness (Phillips, 2006: Ch. 2). But the utility or quality of life may be judged not simply in terms of healthy life expectancy, but happy life expectancy (Veenhoven, 1996). The study of happiness The ideal generally espoused by welfare economists has been that the optimal distribution of goods necessary for well-being is best achieved under conditions

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The thin and the thick of need and needing

of sustained economic growth and general affluence. In this way, everyone can be happy (provided they keep healthy). At any particular point in time there is a positive correlation between a person’s happiness and her income (Di Tella & MacCullough, 2007), but there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that economic growth does not necessarily promote additional happiness. In many countries, rising Gross National Product (GNP) does not correlate with increased well-being (Layard, 2011; B. Searle, 2008). The tiny, predominantly Buddhist, nation of Bhutan has decided it will no longer try to measure its success in terms of GNP, but GNH (Gross National Happiness) (see www.bhutanstudies.org.bt). Elsewhere, however, what has been called the ‘Easterlin paradox’ (crudely, that extra money doesn’t always buy extra happiness) has become something of a preoccupation (Easterlin, 2005). In recent years various kinds of social scientist have turned their minds to the measurement of happiness, life-​satisfaction, personal or subjective well-being. It is possible to measure such things by asking people to say how happy they feel, how satisfied they are with their lives, or to answer a battery of health-​related questions to establish how ‘well’ they feel (mentally as well as physically). Whereas ‘objective’ measures of well-being might draw on indicators such as wealth or poverty statistics (as we shall see in Chapter  7), welfare economists are now interested in ‘subjective’ well-being. They have concluded that people’s replies to such simple questions as ‘How do you feel about life as a whole?’ are generally a good predictor of subjective well-being (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Deeming, 2013; Dolan & Metcalfe, 2012; B. Searle, 2008; Stiglitz et al, 2009). There has been something of a hegemonic movement within the policy-​ making establishment favouring the use of subjective well-being metrics and, within academic social policy, of concepts such as Social Happiness, which is the title of a book by (the perhaps aptly named) Neil Thin (2012). Thin suggests that a ‘happiness lens’ may be brought to bear in social policy in ways that promote empathy, positivity, holism, a lifespan perspective and transparency (2012: xiv). Uplifting as this sounds, it may be argued that a happiness lens could become rose-​tinted spectacles that focus on the importance of positive affect rather than substantive effects upon human well-being. Thin bemoans the ‘happiness-​sized hole in policy processes and academic discourse’ (p 7), but while he is right to call for more attention to the way people feel, it is significant that enduring sources of unhappiness –​for example sickness, bereavement, poverty or homelessness –​ do not appear even as topics in the index of his book. It was Inglehart (1990) who first identified a cultural shift to what he called ‘post-​materialism’. As advanced industrial societies became more affluent, he observed, the preoccupations of their inhabitants begin to change. As material scarcity declines people become more individualistic and introspectively preoccupied (see also U.  Beck & Beck-​Gernsheim, 2001). Evidence from a variety of sources, including the World Values Survey, tended to indicate that as

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Understanding Human Need

economic growth and personal incomes rose across the developed world, empirical measures of ‘happiness’, life-​satisfaction and subjective well-being had stalled. However, it is important to note: first, that the variation in happiness ‘scores’ within countries was less than that between countries, underlining the extent to which cultures are highly context specific; second, that recent time series data suggest that while overall trend in happiness levels in many of the most affluent countries has indeed been largely flat or sometimes downward over the course of the past half-​century, there has been improvement in recent years. What is more, in a majority of countries –​including rapidly developing countries, such as India and China, where living standards for some citizens have still to rise –​the overall trend has been one of rising happiness (Inglehart et al, 2008; 2014). The trends are complex, and interpretations of aggregated data of this nature are, inevitably, contestable (see, for example, Burchardt, 2006b). There remain well-​established doubts, for example, as to the social sustainability of continuous economic growth (Hirsch, 1977); as to whether success within a perennially competitive economic environment may fuel a culture of corrosive anxiety at the level of the individual actor (Pahl, 1995); and as to whether affluence undermines general well-being (Galbraith, 1958; Offer, 2006). The economist Richard Layard (2011) has joined those who claim that riches do not bring happiness. His analysis and prescriptions are described by Jordan (2008) as neo-​utilitarian in nature. Layard draws his definition of happiness from the post-​Western Enlightenment liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting any eudaimonic dimension (2011: 22). He concludes that we should monitor GNP and GNH together; that we should constrain the effects of excessive inequality, exploitative work cultures and rampant consumerism; that (in the UK) we should spend more on mental health provision. But he seeks nonetheless to maximise the sum of utility and to contain the process within the parameters of a cost-​effectiveness analysis. He favours the retention of welfare-​to-​work sanctions and the extension of moral education in schools. The implication is that with better understanding, we can make more people happier. Psychologists in particular have investigated happiness and have made a substantial contribution to the methodological development of the subjective well-being measures mentioned earlier. We shall return to discuss psychological theories of need in Chapter 4, but there are traditions within psychology whose roots lie in medicine and biology and are concerned with the well-being of an essentially asocial human organism (Stenner & Taylor, 2008). From a hedonic perspective, the incidence of mental ill-​health –​clinical depression, for e­ xample –​may be acknowledged as a consequence of the stress of coping with the tribulations of a life in which pleasure may be hard to achieve and pain hard to avoid (Frost & Hoggett, 2008). Welfare economists and hedonic psychologists can agree on certain kinds of explanation. To the extent that increasing levels of material consumption and wealth do not necessarily enhance subjective well-being this may be understood

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The thin and the thick of need and needing

in terms of the decreasing marginal utility of additional consumption on the one hand and the effects of the ‘hedonic treadmill’ on the other (Offer, 2006). People adapt to rising living standards to the point that they no longer find them satisfying. And keeping up with the Joneses can be unsatisfying, exhausting or depressing. The utilitarian arithmetic alluded to by Hobsbawm gets more difficult. As Beverley Searle has put it, subjective well-being ‘is an entanglement of experiences, a process with no beginning and no end’ (B. 2008: 104). Happiness can be elusive, and Tania Burchardt has suggested that though social scientific investigators of happiness might be ‘barking up the right tree’, they might be doing so ‘in the wrong neck of the woods’: ‘the goal of social policy should be actual well-​being, not just the cosy sensation of well-​being’ (2006b: 157).

Thick needs and eudaimonic notions of well-being Mention was made in Chapter 1 of everyday ‘socially reformist’ and ‘paternalistic’ meanings that can attach to human needs. Both kinds of meaning may in some way connect with ‘thicker’ conceptions of need and the eudaimonic elements of human well-being. What I have caricatured as socially reformist meanings have roots in an acknowledgement that though human beings may individually be economic actors, they are also necessarily social beings. The roots of such meanings may therefore lie in an either implicit or explicit form of reformist solidaristic humanism (see discussion in Chapter 2). Paternalistic meanings may have roots –​once again, implicitly or explicitly –​in a more conservative form of solidaristic humanism, and a compassionate (possibly religiously inspired) rather than an authoritarian moral concern for the needs of weaker or wayward members of society. We shall consider briefly some of the philosophical underpinnings that may attach to such meanings, but also some more recent thinking about what social well-being entails. Philosophical underpinnings: in search of the good life The Aristotelian conception of the ‘good life’ provides not necessarily a constitutive foundation, but the beginnings of a pathway or pathways leading to eudaimonic conceptions of human well-being. While the hedonic pathway led to utilitarianism, the eudaimonic approach has led in different directions. Elements of the approach translated themselves during the 18th century onwards into Kantian ‘deontological ethics’ (Kant, 1785); that is to say, into notions of universal moral duty and the contention that not only does everybody have a right to well-being, but nobody should be treated as a means of achieving happiness for another. Such thinking opened the door to the social liberalism that informed the creation of modern welfare states; to socially liberal conceptions of social justice, such as that espoused by Rawls; and, for example, to Sen’s capability approach (both of which we shall discuss in Chapter 4).

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The principal critique of the social liberal approach came from a variety of radical democrats or ‘left-​communitarians’ (for example, MacIntyre, 2007; Sandel, 1982; Walzer, 1983) who can in various ways trace their thinking back to the Aristotelian tradition, and in particular to the idea that human knowledge and governance are fundamentally social or collective enterprises. Their objection was to the abstract nature of the individual ‘self ’ that is posed in liberal deontology as opposed to a presumption that the mutual obligations human beings owe to each other are grounded in the realities of their social belonging. This particular brand of communitarianism has much in common with the republicanism of Rousseau and Montesquieu, and embodies tendencies, at least, to social conservatism. Post-​ Enlightenment republicanism favoured the Aristotelian rather than the Platonic tradition in that it envisaged a republic governed not by philosopher kings, but by the general will of the people. The republican approach was by implication more eudaimonic. It assumed that human relations amount to a collaboration between vulnerable but cooperative beings; that dealings between people entail various forms of interpersonal attachment or belonging. Social liberalism and social conservatism each potentially, therefore, embody a eudaimonic interpretation of the good life:  the former premised more on abstract philosophical doctrine; the latter more on a concern for cultural norms. The former, as it evolved, became increasingly associated with the politics of social democracy, with its emphasis on promoting social justice. The latter, as it evolved, became increasingly associated with the politics of Christian democracy with its emphasis on preserving the traditional social order. Both, however, attached some value to solidarity and the idea that there is virtue in sharing risks and responsibilities. For example, social liberalism and social conservatism have each embraced social insurance and/​or social protection principles (which will be further discussed in Chapter 7). Forms of social provision premised on social insurance or universalistic social protection entail solidaristic notions of risk-​ sharing: they are consistent with a ‘eudaimonic ethic’ (a concept to which we shall return in Chapter 9). They imply ostensibly a concern that human society should do more than abate or avoid the suffering of its members, but enable them, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the life-​course, to participate and to flourish. The development of various ‘modern’ forms of welfare state during the second half of the 20th century (Esping-​Andersen, 1990) was made possible by uneasy compromises between different strands of social liberalism and social conservatism:  compromises that laid the foundations of contemporary understandings of social policy and the basis for ‘thicker’ understandings of human need. However, the consensus around which such compromises were formed proved vulnerable to a resurgence of utilitarian thinking and economic individualism that crystallised at the global level as the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 1990): an alternative consensus that has since the end of the 20th century informed a degree of welfare state retrenchment across the global North

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and an approach to developmental aid for the global South that largely favoured a hedonic calculus of free trade, mitigated by welfare safety nets (B. Deacon, 2007). Nevertheless, UN agencies such as the International Labour Organisation have continued to favour insurance-​based or universal social security and the evolution of a ‘Social Protection Floor’ (ILO, 2006; 2012), while the World Health Organization –​in contrast to the Rosser Index mentioned earlier –​has sought to define and to monitor Quality of Life in broadly eudaimonic terms, as: an individual’s perceptions of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live, and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns. It is a broad ranging concept affected in a complex way by the person’s physical health, psychological state, level of independence, social relationships and their relationship to salient features of their environment. (World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL) Group, 1995: 495; and see discussion in Schmidt & Bullinger, 2008) Social quality, social value and relationality A ‘quality of life’ concept (Phillips, 2006) can clearly therefore include a social dimension, and this is explicitly espoused in the concept of ‘social quality’ contained in a declaration by a group of academics –​The Amsterdam Declaration on the Social Quality of Europe –​issued in 1997. The concept was intended to capture the intention expressed in Jacques Delors’ call for a social dimension to the European Union and to establish a dialogue or dialectique between economic and social policy concerns (W. Beck et al, 1997). Social quality was to be a multidimensional concept, through which to evaluate European citizens’ enjoyment of economic security (as a matter of social justice), social inclusion (through forms of participation), social cohesion (by way of social recognition) and personal empowerment (from the exercise of compassion and social responsiveness). The theoretical and empirical development of the concept was furthered by the European Foundation on Social Quality, which in 2013 became the International Association of Social Quality (www.socialquality.org) and now defines social quality as ‘the extent to which people are able to participate in social relationships under conditions which enhance their well-​being, capacity and individual potential’. This ‘new vision’ is focused on the objective, subjective and normative conditions of life around the world. The theoretical elaboration of the social quality concept has become somewhat complex (Baers et al, 2005; van der Maesen & Walker, 2012). The components of social quality have been conceptualised in relation to ‘tensions’ between macro and micro level concerns on the one hand and between the organisational and the community level on the other. Each of these tensions have been conceptualised in part through Jürgen

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Habermas’ (1987) celebrated distinction between system and life-​world, and this common influence is reflected in a certain amount of conflation within the modelling process. As presented, social quality is not of itself a unitary concept. Nevertheless, the analysis resonates in certain respects with the approach to human need developed in this book. We shall touch again on the social quality model in Chapter 6. Another alternative approach to social well-being has been provided through Bill Jordan’s notion of ‘social value’ (2008). This concept is more vaguely specified yet more encompassing than that of social quality. Jordan’s argument is that the ascendancy of an economic model of welfare represented by the Washington Consensus, the marketisation of public service delivery and the promotion of self-​provisioning –​especially in the Anglophone countries –​have crowded out the socially valuable personal relationships, the trust and the participation that sustain the quality of people’s lives. Economic theory, he argues, reinterprets and remoulds the functioning of social institutions and cultural traditions as if they are contracts for individual utility maximisation. Utility becomes ‘a single calculus, and a single currency for exchange’ (p 62). In this context Jordan advances his own critique of the increasingly hegemonic concept, social capital (Field, 2003). Social capital theory blames the Easterlin paradox (see earlier) on deficiencies of social capital, whereas Jordan blames it on the destruction of social value. Social value is presented as an alternative to social capital, and the source of human well-being. There are resonances between Jordan’s arguments and those of other thinkers referred to at various stages throughout this book, including Marx, Baudrillard, Honneth and Douglas (who we shall specifically consider in a moment). Another multidimensional and multidisciplinary conceptual framework addressed to well-being in a global context was developed by the ESRC Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group at the University of Bath. Their framework rested on five ‘key ideas’: 1) The centrality of social human being; 2) Harm and needs; 3) Meaning, culture and identity; 4) Time and processes; 5) Resourcefulness, resilience and adaptation (McGregor, 2007: 321). Here is a set of concerns that may be held in common by different disciplines from across the social sciences and which can all be encompassed by a term such as ‘wellbeing’. However, the resulting approach, like that used to define social quality, is complex. It lacks the parsimony or elegance to be hoped for in an effective or enduring theoretical framework. It turns ‘well-being’ into a convenient but loosely defined portmanteau term. Nonetheless, the first of the five key ideas –​ the centrality of social human being –​explicitly emphasises relational as opposed to individualistic approaches and the sense in which it is through social being that the wholeness of the person is established. McGregor and Jordan both expressly amplify the claim by the anthropologist Mary Douglas that it is still social, not market, relations that provide the cultural symbols and the meanings that underlie all human exchanges (for example, 1982).

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It is a claim that may be considered in the context of the thumbnail sketch of human history in Chapter 1. Douglas and Ney point to the way that positivist and behavioural social science are premised paradoxically on the asocial individual person. The whole person –​the locus of human transactions and the constructor of myth and meaning –​is missing; replaced by a ‘choosing machine’ (1998: 184). Douglas and Ney acknowledge that, potentially, their argument is ‘implicitly reactionary yet radical at the same time’ (1998: 4). They recall Sahlin’s claim that pre-​modern hunting gathering societies are not necessarily needy, because their wants are scarce and their means plentiful (see earlier). But Douglas and Ney clearly do not advocate an enforced return to a supposedly carefree Stone Age existence. Certainly, human need is not solely satisfied by access to material goods; it also involves persons as cultural and political creatures, whose prime need is to communicate with others and who, in communication with others, make moral judgements about their needs. Certain social scientists from within different disciplines have attempted to frame more insightful notions of relationality. For example, as an economist Bruni (2010) reflects on the idea of ‘relational goods’. And as a psycho-​therapist Gergen (2015) reflects on interpretive methods for understanding clients’ lived experiences of relational processes. Relationships between human beings are to be valued for the ways they assist, support or help to shape the achievement of individual or personal well-being. But from the perspective of the concept of sociality discussed in Chapter 2 they may also be regarded in a more fundamental sense constitutive of human well-being. Insights into relational well-being or relationality are similarly offered by emerging psycho-​social approaches in social policy (Stenner & Taylor, 2008; D. Taylor, 2011), which contend that relational well-being is a social process, not an individual outcome; it is a socially situated experience, not a subjective state. Certainly, this entails a thick rather than a thin conception of human sociality. As David Taylor succinctly puts it, ‘there is no such thing as individual wellbeing outside human relationships’ (2018: 9). And though Taylor contends that need and well-being ‘refer to two distinct components of human life’, Marx’s claim that the human essence lies in ‘the ensemble of human relations’ (Donati, 2013: 352) would suggest that human need and relational well-being may be regarded as effectively coterminous. The ambiguous ‘cultural turn’ affecting the social sciences that began in the 1970s (for example, J.  Clarke, 1999) opened the door to the recognition of diversity and difference; to post-​structuralist understandings of the production of meaning; and to cultural as much as structural forms of explanation. Elements of this turn assisted our understanding of, but also resonated with, the processes of cultural individualisation alluded to earlier and coincided with the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996): that is to say the process by which –​to invoke, once again, Habermas’ terminology (1987) –​the ‘life world’ has been colonised by ‘the system’; by which social institutions have, increasingly, been taken over

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by the market and subjected to market principles; by which awareness of the ‘social’ has been displaced by preoccupation with the subjective ‘self ’ and with self-​management. But some elements of the cultural turn have led on to critical conceptualisations of relationality (C. Powell & Depelteau, 2013), of the essentially relational subject and of the ‘We-​relation’ (Donati, 2013): that is to say the generative dynamics of action and interaction to be found in every field of social relations; and the sense that human beings do not necessarily shape, but are shaped by, their relationships with one another and with the associations and institutions that they collectively create. Sarah White (2017), for example, argues for a concept of relational wellbeing premised on a relational ontology and an acceptance that relationality is fundamentally constitutive of subjectivity. The autonomous individual of economic liberalism, she argues is a ‘cultural myth’. But The person as a simple component of the collective is similarly a fantasy. Instead … one of the puzzles that all human societies have to grapple with is the relationship between individual and collective, the self and other(s). … Within all societies there is variability … complexity, inconsistency and contradiction. Within all persons, there is conflict and ambivalence between belonging and autonomy. And collectivities are neither the simple sum of individuals, nor some super-​ individual in themselves, but develop emergent properties according to the relations that compose them. (p 129) The individual human being is thus to be understood as a ‘relational self ’; a term that chimes with Selma Sevenhuijsen’s (2000) concept of a ‘self in relationship’, to which we shall return in Chapter 9. It also chimes –​up to a point –​with Aristotle’s concept of Philia (usually translated as ‘friendship’) albeit that Aristotle distinguished between friendships founded on utility or pleasure on the one hand and, on the other, authentic relationships founded on the ‘good’. It is in the latter sense that Philia amounts to a virtue and is integral to Eudaimonia and a ‘truly’ good life (Aristotle, c. 350 bce). However, in associating relational well-being with thick conceptions of human need we are concerned not with judgements regarding the qualitative or moral character of particular kinds of human relationship, but the wider constitutive nature of relationality for the human ‘self ’: the self we call ‘I’. As Judith Butler puts it ‘… the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation –​or a set of relations –​to a set of norms’ (2005: 8).

Dignity and caring We shall conclude this discussion of thin and thick needs and needing with some observations as to the essence of the human condition and the nature of human agency.

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In Chapter 2 we addressed a spectrum of characteristics by which human being may be defined. In response to the trend in the post-​modern era to individualisation (see earlier) and the ways in which neo-​liberal thinking has problematised dependency upon state welfare provision (H. Dean & Taylor-​Gooby, 1992), there has been much thoughtful discussion as to the extent to which social policies addressed to meeting human needs can enhance or undermine a person’s essential human agency; her autonomous thinking and doing (for example, A. Deacon & Mann, 1999; P. Hoggett, 2001; F. Williams, 1999). To frame this question another way, is it more important to promote human dignity or human caring? The preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 announces that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. It has been argued elsewhere that: Such recognition may be normatively interpreted as a claim to equal integrity and personal autonomy amidst a family of atomistic, self-​ seeking individuals; though, potentially, it might also be interpreted as a claim to inclusion and ontological security within a diverse and interdependent human family. (H. Dean, 2015: 152) The UDHR goes on in Article 1 to contend that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. We shall discuss rights in Chapter 8. The concept of dignity, however, is deeply ambiguous. The notion of ‘inherent’ or inborn dignity was dismissed by Hannah Arendt as ‘the last and possibly most arrogant myth we have invented in our long history’ (1951: 439). Arendt, like Marx (of whom she was nevertheless the fiercest of critics), insisted that humanity is defined not merely by human biology, but essentially by human history and communal activity. The UDHR had been instituted in the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust. And Arendt’s point was that those events, in which so many people had been stripped of their humanity, demonstrated there is nothing inherent about dignity. Dignity may be sought and achieved through human community, yet in real life it may also be brutally negated. Human beings are not born free and equal. At birth they are vulnerable and needy. In their transition to maturity they are utterly dependent upon the care of other human beings. At subsequent stages within the human life-​course –​ and particularly towards the end of life –​every human being will be to some extent dependent upon the care of other human beings. In maturity, it is only in association with other human beings that a right to equality can have meaning, and at no point in human history has such a right been substantively and wholly inalienable. It is only within the social relations of interdependency upon which human life depends (and which are seldom equally constituted), that human beings can potentially experience personal freedom –​or what some might call

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‘dignity’. As the pan-​African Ubuntu saying goes –​‘a person is only a person through other persons’ (Gade, 2011; Ramose, 2003). Paradoxically, it is because dignity is such an indeterminate and polysemic concept that it has been capable of retaining such universal purchase. The English word has its origins in the Latin dignitas, which relates to worth or to being worthy. And in the era of classical antiquity dignity was not regarded as universal attribute of all humans, but a particular attribute of an elite. It was a term that signified a status that was honourable and virtuous, a rank accorded in recognition of such status and/​or the outward appearance befitting such rank. These meanings have continued to apply, albeit inconsistently, in everyday use of the word in the Western world and, it is suggested, have parallels within concepts propounded by Eastern philosophical traditions (Donnelly, 2013). Nevertheless, the concept has been inflected so as to admit its application in certain contexts to the supposedly inherent moral worth of every human being. The effect of such usage is rhetorically powerful, yet it elides extraordinary disparities of understanding. Such disparities are illustrated in discussions of poverty (see Box 3.2).

Box 3.2:​Poverty and suffering with dignity Poverty or ‘extreme poverty’ has been defined as a violation of human dignity (Lister, 2004; United Nations, 1993). Anti-​poverty campaigners sometimes call not only for the relief of poverty, but also recognition for the dignity of people experiencing poverty. The international campaign group ATD Fourth World recently anglicised the acronym within its title, so that ‘Aide à Tout Détresse’ (help for all in distress), became ‘All Together in Dignity’. ATD Fourth World’s aim is to enable people experiencing poverty to fight stigma and prejudice by promoting a sense of shared dignity. People experiencing poverty are encouraged to empower themselves by publicly acknowledging their poverty and demonstrating dignity in poverty. It may be argued that there is paradox here. If poverty strips people of their dignity, should the people experiencing poverty be championed for their resilience and the way in which so many of them nevertheless suffer with dignity? Should they not respond to their poverty with indignation (H. Dean, 2015: 154)? If poverty is a state of indignity, combatting poverty requires action, resistance and demands for social change. There are other social movements that would encourage oppressed people, such as those experiencing poverty, to behave not with dignity, but outrage (Hessel, 2011). They should refuse to suffer with dignity. Though the notion of dignity is generally equated with the capacity for agency, it can also be equated with submission, acquiescence and an acceptance of relative powerlessness.

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The thin and the thick of need and needing

The dominant understanding of ‘dignity’, whether implicitly or explicitly, is premised thinly on what was characterised in Chapter 2 as liberal-​individualist humanism; a humanism that embraces a belief in individual sovereignty. Yet there is an alternative thicker understanding premised on a solidaristic humanism, wherein the assertions made in the UDHR can be interpreted as representing ‘a collective recognition of individual frailty’ (Turner, 1993: 507; and see Turner, 2006). To assert that even the most vulnerable human being has intrinsic worth and is worthy of care and protection is to embrace a belief that it is not enough to relieve the basic needs of people who are frail, dispossessed or powerless; they need also to be recognised as ‘members of the human family’. It may be argued that dignity is, or may be, regarded as ‘fundamentally relational’ (S. C. Miller, 2017). But as the discussion in Box 3.2 has illustrated and as the metaphor ‘the family’ should remind us, all human relations –​from the global to the local –​ entail some exercise of power, whether it be oppressive or benign. Insofar as the word ‘dignity’ can be inflected to assert that every human being is worthy of care, we now turn to consider care and caring. ‘Care’, like ‘need’, is used both as a noun and a verb. All human beings will receive care in the course of their lives, virtually all can in some way, or to some extent, provide care for other human beings and/​or are capable of caring about other human beings (Parker, 1981). Care is always defined, directly or indirectly, with reference to need: to our attentiveness to, and responsibility for, the needs of others (Tronto, 1994). Care must clearly be understood in relation to sociality as a constitutive human characteristic. Many other sentient creatures may ‘care’ for their young or for other members of their herd or pack. But the care of which human beings are capable exceeds that which is ‘natural’ or governed by instinct. It also extends to care that is governed by moral reasoning or ethics (Noddings, 2013). This is not to say that norms of mutual care within human societies have been founded on some rational utilitarian calculus. Maternal care, aspects of caring in intimate relationships and (possibly) other socially cooperative behaviours continue to exhibit elements that are ostensibly determined by natural or biological influences. But the norms of human behaviour are for the most part socially constructed, transmitted or negotiated (Finch & Mason, 1993). The ‘Spirit of the Gift’, thought to have been manifest in early hunter-​gatherer societies (Sahlins, 1974), was unique to the human species, and its legacy, some would suppose, survives in the way that through social and development policies contemporary societies sustain varying degrees of altruistic solidarity within and even beyond national boundaries (for example, Titmuss, 1970). Care and forms of caregiving are constitutive features of the human species as a whole: they are human needs. Caregiving is a constitutive need in that it is a form of necessary and socially valuable activity or ‘work’ for the provider (as discussed in Chapter 2) and in the sense that it is a form of social relation, both for the provider and the recipient (V. Held, 2006). Caregiving is for the most part, quite literally a ‘labour of love’

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(Finch & Groves, 1983), but also sometimes a form of often poorly remunerated wage labour. And socially constructed forms of, and perspectives upon, care are highly gendered (Gilligan, 1982). Face-​to-​face caring for children and for frail or disabled adults is predominantly provided by women, and the conceptual framing of associated moral issues can differ between men and women. Feminist perspectives have therefore dominated debates around the ethics of care and have focused much attention on inequalities of power within caring relationships. Such inequalities relate not only to relationships between men and women, but between parents and children and between carers (whether family or paid professionals) and adults. The inequalities within such relationships may often be ‘generous’ in nature and deep caring relationships can generate feelings of ‘joy’ (Noddings, 2013: Ch. 6); a sense of emotional fulfilment on the part of the one caring and the cared for. But as has been suggested there is also scope for oppression and exploitation. The most essential ‘moral risk’ is that a slave-​like subservience among persons who are cared for is promoted as a virtue (for example, Davion, 1993); as another kind of suffering with dignity (see Box 3.2). Care, therefore, can be considered not just a practice or an emotion, but as a virtue or an ethic and therefore as a component of eudaimonic well-being, albeit that such an ethic might sit in tension with an ethic of justice. We shall consider in Chapter 9 how a new ‘axiology of care’ (De Sousa Santos, 2006) might resolve that tension.

Conclusion/​Summary This chapter has: • Developed a distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ conceptions of human need or human well-being. It is a broadly drawn distinction that rolls together a number of the ways in which the metaphors of thin and thick may be applied. But it is a peculiar (in the literal sense of that word) adaptation. The sense that best captures this is provided through discussion of the distinctive hedonic and eudaimonic notions of well-being. The hedonic is ‘thin’ insofar as it may be individualistic, utilitarian and/​or abstract. The eudaimonic is ‘thick’ insofar as it may be solidaristic, in some sense spiritual and/​or organic. • Argued that thin or hedonic notions of need are implicated not only in classically utilitarian social policies but in the emergence of a form of welfare economics premised on cost-​efficiency in social service provision. However, recent developments within certain branches of economics and psychology have focused on the Easterlin paradox, which suggests that rising affluence and state welfare provision in modern developed economies are not necessarily making people any happier. The challenge is that of ensuring that economic development and human happiness remain in step with each other.

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The thin and the thick of need and needing

• Argued that thick or eudaimonic notions of need are implicated in potentially contradictory ways both in liberal conceptions of social justice on the one hand and in certain strands of social conservatism and ‘leftish’ strands of communitarian thinking on the other. Recent developments within the social sciences have elaborated a variety of approaches to ‘social quality’; to arguments about the promotion and production of ‘social value’; to ‘relationality’ and relational well-being. The challenge is to restore some priority for the constitutive social dimension of human life. These differently conceived challenges imply different approaches to social policy. • Considered the problematic and intersecting concepts of dignity and care. When ‘thinly’ conceived (in the sense developed in this chapter) ‘dignity’ alludes to the abstract and inherent worth and autonomy of the human individual so eliding the substantive reality of human beings’ vulnerability and dependence on mutual care. When dignity is more thickly conceived our attention is drawn to the extent to which the realisation of a good life is fulfilled through social relations of care and caring (but also the implications when relations of care are undermined by inequalities of power).

Challenging questions 1. Is the idea of a continuum between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ forms of human needing a useful heuristic device or a distracting oversimplification? 2. How can human beings have individual dignity when they are essentially vulnerable interdependent creatures?

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4 Needs in theory

This chapter will address what may be regarded as ‘top-​down’ theories of human need, by:

• • •

considering classic human individualist theories having general relevance for social policy; discussing some more specific perspectives on human need that have been adopted within academic social policy; addressing some critical/​alternative theoretical perspectives.

Having in the last chapter considered a distinction between ‘thin’ needs and ‘thick’ needs, we turn now to consider the other broad distinction prefigured in Chapter 1, that between needs that are conceptually or theoretically defined from the ‘top-​down’ and those that may be experienced and interpreted from the ‘bottom-​up’. It is to top-​down theory that this chapter will now turn, while ‘bottom-​up’ interpretation will be discussed in Chapter 5. Specifying needs adjudged to be inherent to the human subject requires suppositions about what exactly constitutes the living and embodied human actor; in other words, an explicit or implicit theory of personhood. But it must be recognised that the distinction between top-​down theory and everyday interpretation can never be hard and fast. There is an abundance of theory and endless controversy regarding human need, yet it may be contended that substantive knowledge about human need can ultimately have no epistemological basis:  all that we have is inference based on experience (McLeod, 2011). What may be theorised as inherent needs are likely at some stage to have been founded on interpretive assumptions grounded in experience, while interpretive accounts will often draw from theorised definitions of need handed down on the authority of rulers, priests, scholars and philosophers. The significance of this interdependence (or ‘dialectic’) between these two kinds of insight will be considered in later chapters. The current chapter will focus on a selection of key theories that assert or assume human needs to be inherent to the human person.

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Understanding Human Need

Classic human individualist theories Previous chapters have already demonstrated some of the different ways in which the human individual may be conceptually constructed or envisaged. The hegemonic liberal-​individualist humanism to which I have already drawn attention characterises the human being as a rational individual subject. Such a subject may be variously construed as primarily: (1) an economic actor; (2) a psychological being; or (3) a socially situated yet essentially autonomous individual. The economic actor (homo œconomicus) The economic actor is a person whose needs may be primarily defined in relation to her self-​interest as an individual producer and consumer when she exercises rational and un-​coerced choices under free market conditions. Adam Smith (1776), who is widely regarded as the founder of classical economics, held that under the influence of the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces, a freely functioning economy can be relied upon to provide for everybody’s needs. His assumption was that the wealth created by a flourishing economy can provide for everyone’s needs, though, as we shall see in Chapter 5, he had something more to say about what constituted ‘necessities’. Following in the footsteps of Adam Smith, so-​called ‘welfare’ economists (for example, Johanssen, 1991; Pareto, 1909; Pigou, 1920) went on to bring classical concepts of economic equilibrium to bear so as to determine the extent to which the distribution of income, goods, services, jobs and life-​chances could be made optimally efficient. From an economic perspective, needs are inferred from people’s wants, preferences or desires. According to one introductory Social Policy textbook, when it comes to the supply of, and the demand for, welfare services ‘analysis begins from an assumption of scarcity –​we can’t have everything we want. So people and society must make choices’ (Propper, 2012: 40). The application of market principles of competition and choice can bring to public service provision –​ in the fields of healthcare and education, for ­example –​another kind of ‘invisible hand’, ensuring that needs are met not only as efficiently as possible, but also equitably and to the highest reasonably attainable standards (Le Grand, 2007). The individual economic actor is the atom (the simplest irreducible element) of the free market process –​whether as a consumer or a producer of goods or services. In the context of market transactions, the preferences, wants or desires of one party to a transaction are put at the services of the other’s utility. The rationale of economic activity is seen to lie in the production of goods or services for the satisfaction of consumer needs or wants. But the distinction between needs and wants of the consumer becomes immaterial. Adam Smith famously observed that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’ (1776: 11).

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Needs in theory

In this analysis it is assumed that our preferences, wants and desires reflect our objective interests or have their roots in our interests (cf G. Thompson, 1987: Ch. IV). But, though our interests may drive or motivate our desires, our desires may well conflict with certain of our fundamental needs. The suppliers of tobacco products, sugary foods and fossil fuels, for example, may acknowledge that their products are actually harmful to their customers and/​or to the environment and therefore contrary to consumers’ long-​term interests, but suppliers are willing nonetheless to satisfy the misguided preferences of consumers or to reap advantage from the constrained circumstances and limited choices faced by powerless consumers. Many people choose to engage in activities that are detrimental to their own survival or their health, not necessarily in short-​sighted pursuit of immediate pleasures; but in desperation; for love; in defence of the well-being or honour of family or country; or on the basis of deeply held religious or political beliefs. Living in a globalised capitalist economy we are all of us, in practice and in part, economic actors. Markets and market-​based systems can work effectively to provide for human need. But how far can human needs and objective interests be inferred from our behaviour as economic actors? Box 4.1 provides an illustration of the multiple layers of meaning that may underlie an ostensibly simple market transaction.

Box 4.1:​The wants and needs of the apothecary and Romeo In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act V, Scene I), Romeo seeks out an apothecary in order to procure some poison with which he intends to commit suicide. The apothecary’s business is failing, not least because the sale of poisons for any purpose had been made illegal, and he is destitute. Yet he is fearful of the death penalty to which he would be liable should he be caught selling poison. Romeo, handing him the generous sum of forty ducats, says: Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes, Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back; The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law; The world affords no law to make thee rich; Then be not poor, but break it, and take this. The apothecary succumbs, saying, ‘My poverty, but not my will, consents’; to which Romeo replies, ‘I pay thy poverty, and not thy will’. It mattered little to Romeo whether the sum he paid would satisfy the apothecary’s needs. What mattered was that he could now fulfil his own desire to kill himself, a desire

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clearly contrary to his objective or ‘vital’ interests. His desire to do so was motivated by his love for Juliet; or, more precisely, because having to part from Juliet would be harmful to his interests insofar as it would frustrate a different, yet deeply felt, need for love. On the face of it, the ‘needs’ of the apothecary and Romeo were met by the conclusion of a market transaction. The apothecary’s immediate hunger was presumably satiated, and Romeo successfully killed himself. But the apothecary had not wanted to sell the poison, and would have to live with fear of the possible consequences and, we might suppose, a sense of guilt. By consuming the poison, Romeo did as he had wanted, but he lost his life and his love.

When the interests of market actors are interpreted through the preferences or choices they can be observed to exercise, utility is reduced to an abstract or sometimes a formal mathematical function. It may be argued that how much we are prepared to pay for something is a measure of how much we need it. But such an assumption can’t come into play unless economic actors have freedom of choice. And it is with precisely this in mind that classical economic thinking can be hostile to the very idea of state welfare intervention. The provision of public services and welfare benefits constrains the choices of those who receive them (Hayek, 1976), while the collection of taxes to pay for such services and benefits constrains the freedom of others to spend their money as they choose (Nozick, 1974). According to this account it is the free and unfettered market that can most efficiently and equitably allocate the resources necessary for the satisfaction of human need. ‘Real’ need is represented by un-​coerced choices that free individuals are able to make. If in a free market the needs of those who choose badly remain unmet, that may be unfortunate, but it is not unjust. Insofar as markets may fail or function inequitably (Le Grand et al, 2008: Ch. 1) there is a role for social policy. But the strictest adherents to this account of human need would see this as a minimal role. The role of the state should be to provide safety nets for those whose essential needs remain unmet and to regulate external effects over which markets have no control. Beyond this the job of the state is to defend and promote the free choice of the human individual. As economic actors, human beings are defined, it is supposed, by rational choice-​making. The psychological being The psychological being is a person whose needs may be defined with reference to the inner drives of the human individual. The origins of psychology as a social science, albeit one that has often had close connections with medical science, can be traced back to philosophical traditions (Cheung Chung & Hyland, 2012).

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We have already noted in Chapter 2 the significance to liberal individualism of Cartesian dualism –​a philosophical tradition that distinguishes between the ‘base’ needs of the human body as opposed to the ‘higher’ needs of the human mind and which has been a dominant influence on account of the human individual as a psychological being with a spectrum of needs. The tradition begins, perhaps, with Plato (427–​347 bce) for whom the different parts of the human body called for different human virtues; reflecting, by implication, different levels of human need (see 1974). The head he saw as the seat of reason and has need of wisdom. The chest he saw as the source of will and has need of courage. The abdomen he saw as the seat of appetite and has need of temperance. Plato, the rationalist, appeared to regard the body and its abdominal elements with some disgust, as did Descartes (1596–​1650) –​the philosopher who developed the classic dualist distinction between body and mind (Assiter, 2000: 64). The point for Cartesian dualism is that the ‘noumenal self ’ –​the real me or the real you –​is not located in our bodies at all. And yet we are beholden to the demands of our bodies. The tension between the embodied self, with its biological urges, and the noumenal self, with its higher callings, lies at the heart of the account developed by Sigmund Freud. Freud contended that basic needs are sometimes disguised or ‘sublimated’ so as to drive behaviours that may turn out, for example, to be either highly creative or else profoundly dysfunctional, depending on the circumstances (Stafford-​Clark, 1965: 164–​6). Developments in medical science, which tell us ever more about the complexity of the relationship between body and mind, have informed modern psychological accounts of human need. The best known, and most explicit, is the humanist psychological approach pioneered by Abraham Maslow (1943; 1970), who posited the existence of a hierarchy of human needs. In his original formulation he contended that there are five basic kinds of need that motivate us and these he ordered according to their potency. The first and strongest needs are physiological:  for oxygen, water, nutrients, homeostasis, excretion, sleep, sex, and so on. Second, we need safety: physical security, security of resources, livelihood, family and possessions. Third, we need love and belonging: relationships, family, friendship and sexual intimacy. Fourth, we need self-​esteem; self-​identity and respect, confidence and respect from others. Finally, we need ‘self-​actualization’: self-​fulfilment through achievement. Before his death, Maslow added two more needs: cognitive needs (the need to acquire knowledge and understanding) and aesthetic needs (the need for creativity and the appreciation of beauty and structure). The hierarchy is illustrated in Table 4.1. The hierarchy is sometimes visually presented in the form of a pyramid, with the higher needs towards the pinnacle. This can be taken, perhaps, to imply a degree of moral superiority for the higher needs, but Maslow’s intention was to emphasise that the more potent needs at the bottom of the hierarchy take

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Table 4.1: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs higher needs

lower needs

aesthetic needs cognitive needs

added to the hierarchy in 1970

need for self-actualisation need for self-esteem need for love and belonging need for safety physiological needs

the classic 1943 hierarchy

precedence over those above and must be satisfied before a person can ‘progress’. We shall see that this contention does not hold up empirically, since people can and do risk their personal safety for the sake of another’s love or to achieve social esteem. In affluent societies people on low incomes may literally go hungry in order to maintain forms of consumption by which to ‘keep up appearances’. Nonetheless, Maslow’s model provides a theory of motivation that has had an enduring influence. The assumptions it embodies are reflected in the ways that policy makers tend to prioritise needs. They are reflected, for example, in the kinds of children’s health and education policies that emphasise the need for nurturing environments and the importance of monitoring children’s development. In the context of a discussion of hedonic well-being in Chapter 3, we discussed the emergence of happiness studies and the attention paid by some social scientists to the measurement of subjective well-being (SWB). Directly associated with happiness studies in the 1990s was the positive psychology movement, which while acknowledging Maslow’s theoretical approach, was closely geared to substantive practices in cognitive behavioural therapy. Martin Seligman (2003), the reputed founder of the movement, sought to equate Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia with ‘authentic happiness’, though his emphasis was clearly upon the positive affect of purposeful and meaningful activity, rather than the inherent ‘goodness’ that Aristotle associated with personal fulfilment and the realisation of one’s essential humanity. In this way eudaimonia has itself become a disputed concept. Nevertheless, an important distinction has been drawn between hedonic and eudaimonic approaches in psychology (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Psychologists of various stripes have developed a variety of metrics for the measurement of life satisfaction (LS) and quality of life (QoL), all of which to some degree correlate with happiness and SWB (Camfield & Skevington, 2008), providing complementary insights and a considerable volume of empirical data. Using the terminology I  have adopted in this book, some of the insights emerging from the recent psychological research are contributing a spectrum of ‘thicker’ understandings of well-being and human need. Among the most important of these for our purposes has been the development by Ryan and Deci (2017) of self-​determination theory (SDT). Unlike utilitarian

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theories of human behaviour, SDT is founded on an acknowledgement that human beings may be intrinsically as well as extrinsically motivated. The premise is consistent with the claim that human beings are a self-​determining species, but the focus is on the psychological development of the human individual. The approach is described as ‘organismic’. Humans, it is claimed, ‘have evolved to be inherently curious, physically active and deeply social beings’ and their development is ‘characterized by proactive engagement, assimilating information and behavioural regulations, and finding integration within social groups’ (2017: 4). Beyond their basic biological needs, human beings have certain inherent psychological needs. Specifically, SDT postulates three requirements for psychological health and well-being: autonomy, competence and relatedness (see Box 4.2). All three requirements are held to be equally and indivisibly necessary to the growth and development of the individual. And the attainment of each requirement is susceptible to empirical observation and measurement. The focus is on the organismic integration of the individual self as a bearer of needs.

Box 4.2: Ryan and Deci’s three basic psychological needs Autonomy The need to self-​regulate one’s experiences and action; to be a causal agent in one’s own life; to sustain authenticity and integrity of the self. Competence The need to feel able effectively to function within one’s life context, effectively to internalise cultural values, while exercising control or ‘mastery’ over outcomes. Relatedness The need for social integration and connectedness; to belong and feel significant and cared for among others.

The autonomous individual The autonomous individual to which we now turn is conceptualised not organismically, but as a creature of social liberal ideology (as distinct from economic liberal ideology, from which it is nevertheless a critical derivative). The autonomous individual is conceived as a citizen or member of a human society, whose needs may be defined in relation to the demands of social justice, the process of human development, or the principle of freedom. We shall illustrate each of these in turn.

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Turning first to needs derived from the idea of social justice, we have already seen in Chapter  2 that the 18th-​century philosopher, Kant (1785), began to divine the universal moral rights and duties that should govern relations between rational individual members of a human community; a system of ‘deontological ethics’ (see Box 4.3).

Box 4.3:​Deontology and ontology Deontology is not in fact the opposite of ontology.1 The etymological root of the word ‘deontology’ is the Greek word ‘deon’, meaning ‘duty’. Deontology is an approach to ethics that is opposed to utilitarianism and which argues that our duties towards others flow from the inherent rightness or wrongness of our actions and not the goodness or badness of the actual outcomes or potential consequences of those actions. The etymological root of the word ‘ontology’ is the Greek word ‘ont’, meaning ‘being’, or ‘existence’. Ontology is the study of questions associated with the essence of being, the meaning of existence, the nature of identity. When it comes to human need, deontology is concerned with our duty to respect the needs of others (but not necessarily with the circumstances in which we should directly meet those needs). Ontology is concerned with understanding the needs that are inherent to the integrity of our own and others’ being.

Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ was that nobody should be treated as a means to achieving happiness for another, though he also acknowledged other duties that may be feasible and morally desirable, but which could not be universally demanded. Nevertheless, the inference drawn by social liberals is that it is not merely as individuals that we should respect the needs of other individuals; societies should endeavour collectively to ensure that the needs of all its members are sufficiently provided for. From such a premise, John Rawls (1972) advanced a theory, not directly of need, but of social justice, which is concerned with the distribution of the ‘primary goods’ that every rational person is presumed to need. These include ‘natural’ goods, concerning bodily and mental abilities (health, strength, intelligence, and so on); but also fundamental ‘social’ goods, concerning liberty and individual freedom. Rawls envisaged a hypothetical negotiation

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between rational actors as to the rules that should apply in an imaginary society in relation not only to the defence of liberty, but also with regard to the social distribution of primary goods. The parties to this negotiation would not know what their own station in society would be, so would rationally determine principles of distribution that would be in the interests of everybody. Inequalities (that is, differences in resource allocation) would be permissible provided they were to the mutual advantage of all. The focus of this highly abstract argument is upon fairness, rather than need, but it is an argument that has considerable relevance for the way in which discussions of human need are framed. Such discussions have been rather differently framed in debates about human development. In response to the failure of orthodox economic policies to alleviate poverty in the global South, the Chilean environmentalist and economist, Max-​ Neef (1991; and see Max-​Neef et al 1989) has sought to prescribe an approach to ‘human scale’ development that focuses on fundamental human needs, rather than the economic goods that may or may not satisfy such needs depending on the cultural and social context. He draws a fundamental distinction between needs and the things that substantively satisfy needs. And he proposes a complex and ostensibly randomly composed taxonomy in which he distinguishes between ‘existential’ needs (of having, being, doing and interacting) and ‘axiological’ needs (of subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity and freedom). The taxonomy is used to generate a matrix that illustrates the ‘goods’ –​including the relational and non-​economic goods –​ required to satisfy needs (see Table 4.2). The approach as a whole clearly embraces liberal philosophical values. And there are elements within the taxonomy that resonate in several respects both with the psychological approaches (mentioned earlier) and with Nussbaum’s interpretation of the capabilities approach, to which we now turn. The capabilities approach is a highly influential philosophical approach initially pioneered by Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen (1985; 1999). Unlike Max-​Neef, Sen does not use the term ‘needs’, but draws a similar distinction between economic goods or commodities on the one hand and the existential goods or ‘functionings’ (a person’s being and doings) on the other to which they might lead. But what Sen seeks to conceptualise are the capabilities of the individual actor: not her abilities, but her freedom effectively to choose that which she may be and do. From the capability perspective needs are satisfied not by commodities or their characteristics, but through the capabilities that enable a person to translate or convert them into the functionings or subjective end states that she herself would value and have reason to value. What is distinctive about Sen’s capabilities approach is that it attempts to provide a single all-​subsuming criterion of need:  namely, whether a human being is substantively free to live as she would choose. The approach is arguably less abstract than that of Rawls, and more focused than that of Max-​Neef. By focusing on the

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newgenrtpdf

Fundamental human needs Subsistence Protection

Axiological categories

Affection Understanding Participation Leisure Creation Identity Freedom

Existential categories Being

Having

Doing

Interacting

physical and mental health care, adaptability autonomy, solidarity respect, tolerance, generosity, sensuality critical consciousness, curiosity, intuition receptiveness, dedication, sense of humour imagination, tranquillity spontaneity imagination, boldness, inventiveness, curiosity sense of belonging, self-​esteem, consistency autonomy, self-​esteem, open-​mindedness

food, shelter, work

feed, procreate, rest, work

social security, health systems, work friendships, family, relationships with nature literature, teachers, educational policies responsibilities, duties, work, rights games, parties, clubs, peace of mind abilities, skills, work, techniques language, religions, customs, values, norms equal rights

cooperate, plan, take care of, help share, take care of, make love, express emotions analyse, study, educate, meditate, investigate, cooperate, dissent, share, express opinions day-​dream, remember, relax, have fun invent, build, design, work, compose, interpret get to know oneself, grow, commit oneself dissent, choose, run risks, develop awareness

living environment, social setting social environment, dwelling privacy, intimate spaces of togetherness schools, families universities, communities, associations, parties, churches, neighbourhoods landscapes, intimate spaces, places to be alone spaces for expression, workshops, audiences places one belongs to, everyday settings temporal/​spatial plasticity

Source: adapted from Max-​Neef et al, 1989: 33

Understanding Human Need

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Table 4.2: Max-​Neef’s matrix of fundamental human needs and satisfiers

Needs in theory

substantive freedom of the individual to do or to be that which she values, Sen establishes an essential principle with which better to accommodate the diversity of human beings and the complexity of their circumstances (see Burchardt, 2006a). He deliberately refrains from generating a list of capabilities or needs. However, the concept has been interpreted or reinterpreted in a variety of different ways. Commentators and policy makers can adopt the language of capabilities without necessarily agreeing upon its meaning. Elements of Sen’s arguments were instrumental in the development of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, though in key UN publications (for example, UNDP, 2000), the term ‘human capital’ –​which signifies a very different concept –​was consistently employed as a synonym for human capabilities (see H. Dean, 2008a). And certain of Sen’s own followers (Nussbaum, 2000b; Alkire, 2002; Burchardt & Vizard, 2007) have insisted that by public deliberative processes it is possible to determine what a list of central human capabilities should look like. Martha Nussbaum (2011), a central figure in the Human Development and Capability Association (see https://​hd-​ca.org/​) has ventured where Sen would not in seeking to draw up a provisional list of human capabilities, an exercise which raises issues about the extent to which any particular list can ever be universally applicable (see Box 4.4).

Box 4.4:​Nussbaum’s list of ‘central capabilities’ 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living. Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter. Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason –​and to do these things in a ‘truly human’ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-​beneficial pain. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to

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Understanding Human Need

grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.) 6. Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.) 7. Affiliation. (a) Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other humans, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.) (b) Having the social bases of self-​respect and non-​humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of non-​discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin and species. . Other Species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, 8 plants, and the world of nature. 9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities. 0. Control over one’s Environment. 1 (a) Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association. (b) Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers. Source: Nussbaum, 2011:  33–​4

Social policy perspectives From human individualist accounts I  turn now to accounts of need provided specifically by social policy commentators. In the mid-​1970s the current edition of a widely used introductory text on social administration (as academic social policy was then described) could still claim that the ‘concept of collective provision to meet individual need is the hallmark of a social service’. The task of the discipline, it was contended, is to ask ‘what needs are they trying to meet; why do the needs

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arise; on what grounds, political, moral, economic, does society base its attempts to meet need; how effective are its policies and indeed what are our criteria for effectiveness in this context?’ (Brown, 1977: 13). Student texts of the 1970s would subsequently be criticised for reducing the discussion of need to a largely technical analysis of resource allocation and the prioritisation of competing claims (Taylor-​ Gooby & Dale, 1981: 23). By the 1980s need had become a contested issue. The politically ascendant New Right (N. Barry, 1987) directly questioned whether collective provision for individual need was required, and those who would defend the welfare state were obliged to revisit their understanding of human need. The welfare state or the market? The post-​Second World War welfare states that emerged throughout much of the developed world were most celebrated when –​as in the case of the National Health Service in the UK –​they claimed to be providing people with services on the basis of their need, rather than their ability to pay. The so-​called crisis of the welfare state (Mishra, 1984) laid down a challenge. At the heart of the crisis lay a resurgent pro-​market neo-​liberal economic orthodoxy that was opposed to social spending on welfare and believed in the efficacy of free markets as means of satisfying human need. The ascendancy of neo-​liberal economic thinking was accompanied by a ‘New Right’ political agenda. In what was assumed to be an age of post-​scarcity this agenda was hostile to the very idea of need. It was claimed by some that ‘The word “need” ought to be banished from discussion of public policy’ (A. Williams, 1974 –​cited in Plant et al, 1980: 19). And so, a new debate within social policy began. An important, if guarded, defence of the welfare state was provided by Robert Goodin (1988). Goodin started from the premise that the essential role of the welfare state was to relieve those in distress. If in the process it performed other less necessary functions or benefited people who were not in distress this was a secondary consideration. A minimal welfare state is required in order to protect the most vulnerable members of society and to prevent those who are dependent from being exploited because of their dependency. The central task of the welfare state is indeed to meet need. But according to Goodin this does not mean that there is a compelling case for looking to the welfare state to meet needs while assuming that the market will only meet the people’s less justified wants and desires. The moral justification for the welfare state has nothing to do with the primacy of needs over wants. Goodin engages with and elaborates the tangle of arguments that I have endeavoured to present earlier and emerges with the conclusion that needs do not trump wants as a principle of welfare provision and that there is no case for allowing state provision to supplant market provision. Needs claims and wants claims can’t in practice be disentangled and there is no compelling principle upon which we should regard one as superior to the other.

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Understanding Human Need

In the course of the argument, however, two partial concessions are quietly made. Goodin had contended that where needs claims relate to finite resources that are not reusable (such as money) they do not necessarily take precedence over the several instrumental wants that may be satisfied by that resource. But he acknowledges nonetheless that: Perhaps the paradigm case of a reusable resource is health. It is a necessary instrument for the accomplishment of a great variety of goals. …Where need-​statements refer to reusable resources of this sort, a certain measure of priority of needs over wants is justified. (1988: 39) Second, though he expresses scepticism for the argument that state provision for basic needs promotes personal autonomy (because it would impose a lowest common denominator upon the living standards of its citizens), Goodin acknowledges that: Considerations of personal autonomy might provide an argument for the state’s providing people with needed resources (seen as ‘generalised means to any end’) rather than the state’s foisting particular goods (and through them particular ends) upon people. That is to say, the personal autonomy argument might tell in favour of a welfare state over a command economy. (1988: 47) Despite these concessions (the significance of which may shortly become clearer) the thrust of Goodin’s argument is opposed to a universal conception of human need. While providing strong support for a limited welfare state, Goodin attempts to kick the concept of human needs into touch. Doyal and Gough The concept was rescued from the touchline by Len Doyal and Ian Gough (1984; 1991). Their theory of human need was prefigured in an article in the journal Critical Social Policy in 1984 and then consolidated in a book, published in 1991. Their central concern was not to respond to Goodin, but to reclaim some element of the Enlightenment tradition; to recapture a normative conception of how progress in history is to be made; and to articulate an objective definition of universal human need. Their starting point, therefore, is a critique of the subjective conception of need outlined earlier and of some of the relativist theories of human need that will be discussed in the next chapter. They contend that an inherent conception of human need remains implicit in almost every ideological stance, even those that rail against the desirability or the possibility of defining basic human needs. Neo-​liberals concede by and large that markets can fail and

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that welfare state safety nets may be necessary in order to meet minimal needs. Neo-​Marxists concede that need is not necessarily an ideological construct but that there are real needs, which are violated by capitalism. New social movements, while demanding recognition of the particular needs of, for example, women, gay people, disabled people, oppressed ethnic groups and others, through their opposition to human misery clearly concede that there are universal elements to human need. Radical democrats, while insisting that needs are discursively constructed, will in practice concede that a fully democratised civil study would still require public regulation to ensure that certain needs are met. Even the most extreme cultural relativists acknowledge that there are objective contingencies –​ such as war and famine –​that occasion harm to human beings and from which basic needs must be inferred (Doyal & Gough, 1991: Ch. 2). Doyal and Gough proceed to advance and defend a universal theory of human need and a definition –​with explicit distributional consequences –​capable of application across different cultures and societies. At the heart of their theory is the claim that the universal preconditions for human action and interaction are physical health and personal autonomy. The concessions made by Goodin –​the priority that may be granted to the need for health and the desirability of provision that substantively facilitates personal autonomy  –​find a parallel expression in Doyal and Gough’s theory, save that for them health and autonomy are embraced as key tenets. The need for physical health requires the protection of all people from harm as well as the provision of the means of subsistence, shelter, healthcare and a safe environment. The need for personal autonomy requires that all people should have knowledge and understanding; capabilities and opportunities; and good mental and emotional health: which would imply education or training; the prospect of productive and satisfying work; mental health and family support services. The basic needs for health and autonomy are therefore reflected in a range of intermediate needs, which may be met in a variety of different ways depending on the socio-​economic and cultural context. Doyal and Gough compile a list of intermediate needs, the satisfaction of which is capable of empirical observation and verification. A summary is provided in Table 4.3. Doyal and Gough’s contention is that basic needs should be optimally met, while intermediate needs should, so far as possible, be met to the minimum optimal level. They stress the importance of the societal conditions necessary for needs satisfaction. And here they distinguish between, on the one hand, the universal preconditions that must apply if people are to be able to avoid serious harm and minimally participate as social beings and, on the other, the preconditions that must apply if people are to be able to have critical autonomy and the freedom to live as they choose. The preconditions for the former include the existence of some means of material production and the maintenance of livelihoods (a functioning economy of some sort); social conditions conducive to the biological reproduction and renewal of society; functional arrangements for cultural transmission between

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Understanding Human Need

Table 4.3: Doyal and Gough’s theory of human need: a summary Basic needs

Intermediate needs

Physical health Personal autonomy

Adequate nutritional food and water Adequate protective housing A non-​hazardous work environment A non-​hazardous physical environment Appropriate healthcare Security in childhood Significant primary relationships Physical security Economic security Safe birth control and child-​bearing Basic education

generations so that a way of life can be sustained over time; some elements of political authority for the governance of society and the making of decisions. The preconditions for the latter include some form of effective citizenship, including civil, political and social rights (which I shall discuss in Chapter 8). To this extent, the normative import of Doyal and Gough’s theory is a demand for ‘the satisfaction of the health and autonomy needs of as many people as possible to the highest sustainable levels’ (1991: 110). It stands as the most widely adopted and persuasive theory within academic social policy.

Critical perspectives All forms of intellectual inquiry may be described as ‘critical’ in their initial intent, but we turn now to two kinds of critical thinking about human need: first, to critiques of the human individualist theories; second, to consider further the radical solidaristic humanism alluded to in Chapter 2. Critiquing human individualist theory The diverse range of human individualist thinking outlined earlier represents the broad spectrum within which dominant understandings of human need have been theorised. It is a spectrum that does not so much coincide as intersect with the spectrum of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ needing discussed in Chapter 3. Notwithstanding such heuristic insights as they can offer, the utilitarian focus of economistic understandings and the behavioural focus of empiricist psychology imply a primarily hedonic conception of human well-being that may be criticised for neglecting the more complex moral rationalities that inform human motivations

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(for example, Douglas & Ney, 1998). History is replete with examples of human beings who heroically forego the satisfaction of their own needs in order to ensure the satisfaction of the needs of others. Social policy research demonstrates that people managing on low incomes may deprive themselves of food or other ‘essentials’ in order to ensure that children or loved ones are adequately provided for (Bradshaw & Holmes, 1989; Daly & Kelly, 2015; Shildrick et al, 2012). Social liberalism, with its express concern for social justice, is primarily focused on fairness between individuals. It has been the key ideological driver for the development of welfare states in the global North, but has been described as kind of ‘reluctant collectivism’ (George & Wilding, 1985). Its fundamental aim was to provide for ‘basic’ biological needs and such ‘instrumental’ needs as the individual opportunity for economic and democratic participation. Core elements of a ‘basic needs’ approach also informed international approaches to social development in the global South during the 1970s (Galtung, 1980; Gasper, 2007; Streeten et al, 1981; Wisner, 1988). But when social liberalism was reined in by the global ascendancy of resurgent economic liberalism (or neo-​liberalism), the critical counter movement represented by notions of human-​scale development and, in particular, the capabilities approach began to explore ostensibly ‘thicker’ understandings of human need, potentially addressed to certain axiological and ontological needs previously neglected as much by social liberalism as economic liberalism. However, there are certain issues confronting all the liberal-​individualist approaches discussed earlier, none of which it seems can be entirely satisfactorily addressed, even, for example, in elaborated versions of the capabilities approach: • To what extent can any human being be regarded as an autonomous entity? Human needs must be satisfied in the context of our fundamental interdependency with others. • To what extent can every human being have a say in defining what they need or value? The naming and claiming of needs requires parity of participation in the public realm: something that, as we shall see in Chapter 7, has systemically or in practice been effectively denied to certain sections of the human population. • To what extent can the needs of every human being be adequately met so long as provision for such need is subject to the vicissitudes of capitalist production and distribution? Under capitalist relations of production the means by which needs may be satisfied can’t be wholly free from the direct or indirect consequences of the exploitation of human labour and the dynamics of competition. The liberal foundations of the capabilities concept frame the individual as an independent entity. Individualistic responses to human need tend to ‘problematise’ dependency: that is, they tend to regard the person as if axiomatically she were an individual actor functioning independently from others on life’s stage; as an isolated atom unaffected by the gravitational forces of other particles or

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bodies around her. As a consequence, liberal attitudes tend towards ambiguity with regard to the ways in which people depend on each other. They find certain kinds of dependency (such as ‘free-​riding’ or ‘free loading’) morally objectionable, but perversely regard the dependency of individuals upon their employers for the means of subsistence, or upon their families for everyday care as a form of ‘independence’. Independence is equated, or rather conflated, with self-​sufficiency. Contemporary Western societies are so imbued with the individualistic ethic that they become strangely blind to human interdependency, despite the inevitable dependencies associated with different stages of the human life-​course and despite the extensive social interactions that are essential to human survival. There is a tendency for people to condemn dependency on the part of others and to deny that they are themselves dependent; albeit that  –​paradoxically  –​they may celebrate their own dependability, especially for loved ones, neighbours or friends (H. Dean & Rodgers, 2004; H. Dean & Taylor-​Gooby,  1992). The consequences of this for the capability approach have been identified by Deneulin and Stewart (2000), who contend that social structures matter not only because they may enable or constrain what Sen calls ‘capabilities’, but because they are constitutive of our individual identities and the frameworks of meaning by which we value what Sen calls ‘functionings’. A social being can’t wholly be free from others because the terms on which she belongs within a family, a community or a society will matter as much as her freedom to do or to be. Feminist supporters of the capability approach, in fairness, do not necessarily focus exclusively on the self-​sufficient individual subject. Nussbaum in her list of central human functional capabilities includes ‘affiliation’, which encompasses ‘being able to live with and towards others’ (see Box 4.4). She is clearly mindful of people’s ‘need for care in times of extreme dependency’ (2000a: 48) and that being wholly dependent on another need not subserve one’s moral personality. To this end, she argues, the goal should be to create ‘a space’ within which even the most impaired and dependent individual can give and receive love and respect. In her list of central human capabilities, therefore, Nussbaum stipulates that a person should ‘be able to imagine the situation of another and have compassion for that situation’ (2000b: 79). However, it seems that both the person and ‘the other’ are constituted as the abstract bearers of capabilities, not as what Selma Sevenhuijsen, for example, would term ‘selves-​in-​relationship’ (2000: 10). To be capable of ‘imagination’ and ‘compassion’ for the situation of another implies disconnection as a starting point, not a substantive connection. The person and ‘the other’ interact in a metaphorical ‘space of capabilities’. Human identity or moral personality depend in a very immediate and substantive sense upon human association. In the final analysis an autonomous self, existing within an abstract space of capabilities, must remain a conceptual illusion. Insofar as our humanity defines us, it places boundaries on our freedoms.

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Turning to the question of parity of participation in the naming and claiming of need, Sen has acknowledged the role that ‘public reasoning’ must play in evolving definitions of ‘capabilities’ (2005). The capabilities concept rests on the idea that there are things to do and be that the individual values and has reason to value. By implication, the individual must have ‘good’ reason to value such things. But who determines what constitutes good reason? How can recognition be afforded to the value that people may place on them? Such judgements are necessarily contingent and relative. If the capabilities concept is to inform public policy the liberal ideal requires that there should be a public forum in which to deliberate upon the things we should value and to operationalise our capabilities. In the ancient democracies of Athens and Rome the public forum was quite literally a venue for debate. In modern liberal thought it is a metaphorical realm. Habermas (1962) has argued that the public realm as a liberal ideal justifies a social order in which the state is supposedly disengaged from the functioning of a ‘free’ market, yet made accountable before the metaphorical court of public opinion. Nussbaum’s list of central human functional capabilities includes ‘Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life’ (see Box 4.4). Yet, some would claim that we are witnessing a ‘dissolution’ of the public realm (J. Clarke, 2004). Even the most ‘democratic’ consensual agreements achieved in the process of public deliberation –​through public consultations, citizens’ juries, participative poverty assessments or focus groups –​may elide fundamental social conflicts and hidden forms of oppression. Such deliberative processes seldom, if ever, achieve effective ‘parity of participation’ (N. Fraser, 1997). They may do nothing more than reflect prevailing hegemonic assumptions about what kind of a life any of us should value and what kinds of need should therefore be recognised. Just as the forum of public deliberation and debate remains a metaphorical abstraction within liberal thought, so too is Sen’s posited ‘space of capabilities’. And turning to the question of just how the capabilities approach to human need contends with the consequences associated capitalist market economics, we find that the proponents of the approach are largely silent as to the inherent impediments to human freedom that capitalism can pose. Sen is clear that hunger and poverty result from human not natural failures (1999) but he is not a critic of the capitalist mode of production. It may be argued that insofar as the capabilities approach would promote ‘truly human functioning’ (Nussbaum, 2006: 85; and see Box 4.4) it appears to resonate with Marx’s contention that work is constitutive of our ‘species being’ (see Chapter 2). But the capability approach clearly departs from the understanding of capitalism to be found in Marx’s later writings (which we shall consider in a moment) and is silent regarding the extent to which wage labour, as the dominant form that work takes under capitalism, may alienate us from our social humanity. The implication of the capabilities approach appears to be that human development and capitalist economic development are –​potentially, at least –​commensurable.

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Whereas Marx’s unrealised vision was of a society in which there would be a unity of humanity and nature, Malcolm Bull (2007) has suggested that the capabilities approach has an equivalent vision of a path to human development, albeit one in which ‘moving from bare capability to fully human functioning’ will not necessarily be universal. Sen (1999: 6) is anxious to defend the principles of free and fair market exchange, and markets for the exchange of goods and services clearly can serve human ends. But in a market economy there is no guarantee that human needs will adequately be met. Necessary and valuable functionings such as caring for children or for disabled relatives, studying, voluntary work or community participation have no marketable value and are not rewarded by the market (for example, Mooney, 2004). Defenders of the capability approach will argue that it seeks to promote the ‘value’ of functionings that are not marketable. Nussbaum’s list of central human functional capabilities includes, for example, ‘Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think and reason . . . to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities’ (see Box 4.4). Once again, however, the individual is constructed as an abstract bearer of freedoms and the capabilities that should ideally flow from these. The capability approach may demand substantive freedoms to choose, and offer an uplifting vision of what valuable capabilities might consist of, but it is an approach that must be accommodated with the imperatives of the market economy. There is little in the capabilities concept substantively to challenge the ways in which a capitalist market economy can drive inequalities and impair as much as provide for the satisfaction of human need. A radical humanist approach? Alternatively, when seeking to define what is human about human need we have already in Chapter 2 encountered the way in which the individual may be primarily construed neither as an economic actor, a psychological being, nor an autonomous individual, but as an interdependent member of a unique species, whose needs are defined in relation to the distinctive characteristics of that species. This theory of human need that may be distilled from the work of Karl Marx, is a theory of ‘radical’ need (Heller, 1974: Ch. IV). ‘Radical’ here is a term applied to human needs themselves, not merely to the critical nature of Marxist theory. It was noted in Chapter 2 that there are humanistic traditions that are solidaristic and therefore critical of liberal-​individualist humanistic interpretations: conservative traditions that would seek to preserve hierarchically ordered solidaristic structures; and egalitarian social democratic traditions that may be practically indistinguishable from social liberal approaches such as those outlined earlier in that they seek to ameliorate, temper or reform the utilitarian assumptions and individualistic impulses on which capitalist market systems depend. But Marxist theory, though

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associated with revolutionary practice, offers an understanding of human need as the radical essence that is present in the human species itself: in his own words ‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root, but for Man the root is Man himself ’ (Marx, 1843: 137). For Marx, human needs were not objectively natural economic laws, but the ‘Ought in collective being’; the necessity ‘of subjective action, of collective activity, of practice’ (Heller, 1974:  90). Human beings are radically conscious, social, creative and historically self-​determining. Some commentators regard Marx’s account of human needs as inconsistent or contradictory. There is an element of discontinuity between Marx’s early writing and his later writings. Between the two phases of Marx’s work writers such as Althusser, for example, have detected an ‘epistemological break’ (1994); a breakthrough from a normative account to a more scientific form of historical materialism. In his early writings Marx argued that capitalism, though it has advanced the human condition, is inherently alienating and inimical to social humanity. In his later writings, he sought to expose the immanent logic of the commodity form and the wage relation under capitalism and demonstrated how this distorts our understanding of human need. We shall be discussing elements of this later work in the next chapter. However, several writers –​including Heller –​ reject the claim that there is a tension between Marx’s earlier and later writings. Certainly, his thinking was complex, and it developed in the course of his lifetime. Despite this it has been argued by Geras (1983) that Marx consistently espoused a permanent or ‘trans-​historical’ normative standard of human need. There are other writers who argue: that Marx has provided an account of human need with complementary cognitive and normative elements (Soper, 1981); or else that Marx had been presenting two interdependent accounts –​one concerning the need to ‘humanise nature’ (to shape or civilise the natural world in the interests of humanity); the other concerning the need to ‘naturalise humanity’ (to restore human beings’ unity with nature) (Benton, 1988). A fuller discussion of these various commentaries is provided by Hewitt (2000: Ch. 6). There is a sense in which Marxism shares with liberalism that it was a ‘modernising’ project; a ‘grand narrative’ whose era some would say is now past and whose substance is discredited (Fukuyama, 1992; Lyotard, 1984). But we can also see the difference. Marx foresaw that the culmination of human history should out of objective necessity be a better society governed by the principle –​ ‘from each according to his [/​her] abilities; to each according to his [/​her] needs’ (1875). From the most complex of arguments flowed the simplest of aphorisms, which in practice resulted under Soviet Communism in a ‘Dictatorship Over Needs’: an approach to human need that was literally as well as conceptually ‘top-​down’. But we shall see that Marx’s theory of human need may also lead in a different direction when interpreted in light of, or in conjunction with, some of the ‘bottom-​up’ approaches to be considered in the next chapter.

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Conclusion/​Summary This chapter has: • Discussed a range of ‘top-​down’ theories of need which assume that need is inherent to the human subject. Implicit in each concept is a different idea or theory of the person or of personhood. • Explored classic human individualist theories of need, drawing out the different ways in which the individual human actor might be regarded: ◊ where the person is regarded as an economic actor her needs are constituted in terms of utilitarian self-​interest. Her needs may be satisfied through un-​ coerced choices under free market conditions; ◊ where the person is regarded as a psychological being her needs are constituted as inner drives. She needs whatever serves her physical, mental and ontological well-being; ◊ where the person is constituted as an autonomous individual her needs may be constituted in relation to: the primary goods required to maintain social justice; the existential and axiological requirements of human development; the realisation of individual capabilities or freedom to fulfil valued functionings. • Explored accounts from academic social policy where these have drawn on inherent conceptions of human need. It has been shown that: ◊ In the first instance, the social policy debate was focused on the defence of the role of the state in the relief of human distress and, thereby, the meeting of needs which are not, or cannot be, met by markets. ◊ Following this, however, there has emerged what is, perhaps, the pre-​eminent theory of human need in social policy; that advanced by Doyal and Gough. That theory is founded on a rejection of relativism and an assertion that all human beings have need of physical health on the one hand and personal autonomy on the other. The satisfaction of such needs is mediated by a range of satisfiers that will be culturally specific, and it is these that are the everyday concern of social policy. • Critiqued recent innovations in human individualist thinking on human need and ‘capabilities’ before returning to consider the Marxian theory that regards the person as a member of the human species, whose needs are the uniquely constitutive characteristics of her humanity. She needs whatever it is that distinguishes her as an essentially conscious, social, creative and historically self-​determining  being.

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Challenging questions 1. To what extent, if at all, can theories of need premised on economistic, psychological or liberal conceptions of the human individual be complementary or mutually compatible? 2. Do either Doyal & Gough’s or Marx’s respective theories of human need effectively transcend the limitations of individualistic theories of need?

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5 Needs in practice

This chapter will address what may be regarded as ‘bottom-​up’ approaches to human need, by:

• • •

discussing the ways in which need may be socially constructed or interpreted through everyday customs, consumption patterns or lifestyles; outlining relevant social policy perspectives and the practical methods by which policy makers may seek to interpret needs; introduce the notion of insurgent claims making and the ways in which the naming and claiming of needs may be initiated from the bottom-​up.

In this chapter we turn from what the last chapter characterised as ‘top-​down’ theoretical approaches to inherent human needs to practical approaches that are concerned with needs as they are experienced, perceived or interpreted from the ‘bottom-​up’. The contrasting metaphors of ‘top-​down’ and ‘bottom-​up’ are intended to capture the sense of controversy and contestation that surrounds understandings of human need; the fluidity and the negotiability of meanings that attach to human need in everyday life.

Customs and consumption The last chapter briefly summarised some of the critiques advanced, for example, by Doyal and Gough (1991: Part I) in respect of certain ‘relativist’ notions of human need. In this section we shall address certain key relativist positions, emphasising cultural explanations of need and some critical accounts of the needs created by capitalism; and concepts of need in ‘consumer society’. Cultural meanings The process of human civilisation (Elias, 1978) and the creation of customs and culture have, on the one hand, given meaning to human need. The observation that ‘Man is a child of the customs and the things he has become used to … not a product of his natural dispositions and temperament’ had been made by the mediaeval Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldûn (1332–​1406) (cited in Callinicos,

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2007: 11). Needs depend on customs. And yet the way in which they are represented through customs may vary. Indeed they may not be represented through customs or language at all. Lederer (1980: 8) recounts a conversation with a distinguished Japanese academic who explained to her that in Japanese there is no word for ‘needs’. The Japanese language has words that translate into ‘wants’ or ‘desires’ in English, but there is no single term for the concept of need in an ‘objective’ sense. A similar finding from research in Hong Kong is reported by Tao (2004). Not only are understandings of need culturally dependent, but the process of civilisation creates new needs. Four centuries after Khaldûn the realisation across Western Europe that human beings are not descended from gods, but, supposedly, risen from savages, led the philosopher Rousseau (1712–​78) to regret that civilisation of the savage had, in his estimation, substituted artificial and selfish needs in place of natural and selfless ones (Springborg, 1981: Ch. 3). Rousseau yearned for a return to nature and the supposed innocence of the ‘noble savage’. Adam Smith (1723–​90), the liberal economist, was similarly mindful of the difference, for example, between ‘necessities’ and superficial ‘luxuries’ and yet he acknowledged that culture and custom could give rise to necessities. While contemporary economic liberals –​as the inheritors of Smith’s intellectual legacy –​ tend to adopt a minimalist definition of human need, it is striking that the man himself insisted that non-​life sustaining commodities, if people could not forego them without some sense of shame, were indeed necessities. These necessities were customary: they varied in the course of history and between different parts of the world. And such variations are observable. An extended quotation from Smith’s most celebrated work is set out in Box 5.1. And contemporary evidence demonstrates how, in different societies around the world, shame has real and powerful effects in the social construction of necessity and in shaping experiences of deprivation (Gubrium et al, 2014; Walker et al, 2013).

Box 5.1:​Adam Smith on the meaning of ‘necessaries’ ‘By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt for example is strictly speaking not a necessity of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-​labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt. . . . Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the

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lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France, they are necessaries neither to men nor to women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries therefore, I comprehend, not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency, have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries . . .’ Source: Smith, 1776: 691

Illusion, falsity and wastefulness If the process of civilisation and the evolution of customary norms may be said to have shaped human need, the coming of capitalism, according to a variety of commentators, distorted that process. In Chapter 2 I discussed the theory of human need to be found in the earlier works of Karl Marx. In his later work, especially, a different strand of his critique of capitalism also emerges in which he is not concerned with constitutive needs of individuals as human beings but with social needs or the manner in which needs are socially produced (Heller, 1974; Soper, 1981). Through an analysis of the way in which value attaches to commodities under capitalism, he provided the basis on which to claim that capitalism generates false needs. Marx himself, it should be said, did not necessarily express it in exactly these terms, though he held that certain needs, though they are demonstrably and consciously experienced, are nonetheless imaginary rather than real. The essence of his argument (see Marx, 1887) may be paraphrased as follows: • There is a distinction to be made between the use value of a good or a service and its exchange value. The usefulness of something is a direct reflection of the need that it satisfies. But when we exchange goods or services as commodities under capitalism the value we attach to them relates to a notion of equivalence that has nothing to do with their usefulness to us as satisfiers of human need. Useless luxuries may be accorded greater value than necessities. • The exchange value that we attach to a commodity is a reflection not of its usefulness, but of the amount of human labour that went into producing it. A diamond ring may appear more valuable than a linen shirt not only because the scarcity of diamonds arbitrarily drives up the price but because the time, effort, risks and specialised skills of the prospectors, the miners and the jeweller that produced the diamond ring are proportionately greater than those of the flax farmer, the linen weaver and shirt maker who produced the shirt.

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• Under capitalism, however, labour power itself becomes a commodity that is sold in return for wages. Remember that in Chapter 2 I explained that Marx regarded work as a species characteristic: we need to work because that is what defines us as human. But when we work for wages the wage does not reflect the use value of our work, but the exchange value of our labour power. And we are ‘alienated’ from the goods and services we produce in the sense that we do not use them ourselves to satisfy our own needs. • Capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour power. And the exchange value of the goods and services sold under capitalist relations of production includes an element of ‘surplus value’ that derives from that exploitation. That surplus value accrues to the capitalist at the expense of the workers. • Marx therefore argues that we end up with material relations between people and social relations between things. When we buy and sell our labour power we are not satisfying our human needs but behaving as commodities. It is a dehumanising process. At the same time we evaluate the goods and services that we need and equate them with each other in terms of socially constituted characteristics; in terms of what other people have had to do to produce them. • It is on this basis that Marx coined the term ‘commodity fetishism’. The world of commodities, he claimed, is an upside-​down world in which the nature of the exploitation that is suffered is obscured. The way in which the prices consumers have to pay and the profits that entrepreneurs can make may fluctuate according to the state of the market conceals an underlying perversity to the way in which we attribute value to things and the extent to which the everyday perception of human needs is distorted. Interpreted through the machinations of capitalist social relations of production, our needs become estranged from us. This analysis  –​though it is easily misinterpreted and misapplied  –​has been influential in several ways. In particular it informed the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, among whom it was Marcuse who explicitly declared that, through indoctrination and manipulation, capitalist society implants ‘false needs’ in people (1964; and see Springborg, 1981: Ch. 9). This kind of observation has been made by ‘progressive’ liberals as well as Marxist thinkers. In his excoriating critique of late 19th-​century US style capitalism Veblen (1899) coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’. Veblen, a cofounder of the institutional economic movement, was interested in the effects of social and cultural change: in particular the process by which the ostentatious and wasteful consumption of the rich set fashions and standards that the poor aspired to but could never achieve. It is a process that Townsend would later characterise as ‘the prosyletisation of lifestyles’ (1979: 366). The same insight informed Kenneth Galbraith’s iconoclastic account of The Affluent Society (1958). Galbraith was a Keynesian economist and an adviser to Democratic Presidents FD Roosevelt, Johnson and Kennedy. His argument was that despite increasing wealth under

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capitalism and the absence of scarcity, human needs were never wholly satisfied. This, he claimed was partly because of the power wielded by oligopolies, but also because of the new needs generated by a burgeoning advertising industry: needs not everybody could satisfy. Affluence fuelled chronic dissatisfaction. Hirsch (1977) similarly contends that needs and wants proliferate with economic growth, but that there are inevitably social limits. It is not material scarcity that is the problem, but social scarcity. It is not simply that the spectacular consumption of the super-​rich can never be emulated by everybody, but that the value of newly created needs to which people of modest means may realistically aspire may depend upon their scarcity. Certain goods are necessarily ‘positional goods’ since they confer an advantage on those who first acquire them; an advantage that diminishes or may be lost as more people acquire them. The advantage obtained by those at the very back of a crowd by standing on tip-​toe is instantly negated as soon as those immediately in front of them do the same. In the same way, the freedom and privileges enjoyed by the first motorists in a country are rapidly negated when everybody feels they need (and eventually can afford) a motor car, and the roads become congested. It is not merely that extravagant needs become ordinary; they become unsustainable (Taylor-​Gooby & Dale, 1981: 230–​1). Arguing with this in mind and from a ‘realist’ perspective, Assiter and Noonan (2007) insist that it is important to draw a line between needs and wants. There are, they claim, certain fundamental ‘base-​line’ needs that are categorically distinct from consumer wants, and such a distinction is essential in order to sustain the legitimacy of claims on resources, particularly in the context of attempts to address the issue of global poverty. Consumer society And yet it behoves us to consider whether and just how in consumer-​oriented societies it is consumption itself that signals what needs are or are believed to be. In Chapter 4 I mentioned that there are economists for whom utility is an abstract mathematical function. There is a form of ‘welfare economics’ in which the human actor becomes invisible, and it is not what people are experiencing but the prices they will pay for the goods they consume that become an indicator or measure of human need (Pigou, 1928; 1965). This is an extreme economistic approach which, when fully developed, exemplifies what disaffected economics students at the Sorbonne once mischievously dubbed ‘autistic economics’ (Monaghan, 2003; and see www.autisme-​economie.org/​article142.html). This kind of welfare economics is quite literally disengaged from the dynamics of social reality. It is insensitive to social context and responds only to the signal provided by the mechanism of price. Marx, whom we have discussed earlier, had contended that price is a ‘surface category’ that conceals the nature of exchange value and the way in which this elides human need. And yet the internal logic

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of this kind of welfare economics and the way in which it privileges the meaning of price signals have been influential. A very different form of logic is demonstrated through the work of the sociologist Baudrillard. His early writing (1970; and see 1988) provided a significant alternative approach to that of other thinkers. He argued, against Marx, that it is consumption not production that drives capitalism. The need of the consumer becomes institutionalised as the productive force in developed capitalist societies (Giradin, 2000). Baudrillard offers an alternative theory to account for the value of objects. In place of the distinction between use value and exchange value made by Marx he asserts a distinction between symbolic value (which has its roots in pre-​capitalist forms of gift exchange) and sign value (the significance of objects within a socially constructed system of needs). A diamond ring has symbolic value when given as a token of love or of betrothal. Fashionable clothing can signify social status and lifestyle. In later work Baudrillard contends that the infinite plasticity of capitalist values is realised in the age of mass ideological communication and information technology to the extent that the system of signs or ‘simulacra’ implodes into a form of ‘hyperreality’; a meaningless spiral in which there is nothing but symbols and signs. Need is, he claims, entirely a cultural invention. Zygmunt Bauman’s (1998) account of ‘consumerism’ has features in common with Baudrillard. Bauman’s argument is that in the post-​modern age the work ethic is displaced by an ‘aesthetic of consumption’ (1998: Ch. 2). Like Baudrillard, therefore, he is arguing that it is consumption not production that characterises human need. With the shift from an industrial to a service economy, consumer confidence is more important to the health of the economy than full employment. And like Baudrillard he is mindful of the ephemeral nature of consumption: that which we consume, we destroy. But Bauman’s concern is not with signs, but with the ‘spirit’ of consumption. As Townsend was concerned with the proselytisation of lifestyles (see earlier), Bauman is concerned with the proliferation of aesthetic tastes. The consumer’s restless quest is for ever more satisfying sensations and experiences and ‘the promise and hope of satisfaction will precede the need’ (1998: 28). One incidental implication is that there can be no satisfaction in work that is boring, so crude coercion may be required to make people work. The poor, however, are not failed workers, but failed consumers who can’t satisfy the tastes they have come to share with the rich and must therefore endure a chronic sense of insufficiency. The point is that, according to certain theoretical accounts, need does not inhere in the individual but is an artefact of the consumer society.

Social policy perspectives We turn now to interpreted need conceptions to be found in the social policy literature. Social policy is primarily an applied and practical academic subject.

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It has to be aware of how practical responses to need have been, or are to be, shaped. Langan characterises this approach with her assertion that needs ‘are socially constructed, historically specific and contested’, and to understand them ‘we need to examine the wider social and historical context and the influences of ideological and political conflicts as well as questions of resources and policy’ (1998: 7). We shall therefore consider a spectrum of approaches: first, pragmatic approaches to deciding upon what needs should be met; second, approaches based on service user participation as a means to determine need; third, the way in which some social policy academics have engaged with more theoretical accounts of how needs are socially or symbolically constructed. Pragmatic interpretations Public policy makers, social administrators and service providers might look at the discussion I have outlined earlier and ask –​what’s all the fuss about? The old social administration tradition within academic social policy tended to think that needs present no problem: ‘they are simply what the state has chosen to recognise’ (Taylor-​Gooby & Dale, 1981: 214). From within this tradition Jonathan Bradshaw in a celebrated article in New Society had asserted ‘The history of the social services is the story of the recognition of social needs and the organisation of society to meet them’ (1972: 640). On the face of it this is a tautological or circular sort of argument: human need becomes whatever we decide it is. On the other hand, it embraces the kind of pragmatism typified, for example by the International Labour Organisation, which, in the absence of any accepted definition of ‘basic needs’, proposed a Basic Needs Approach to international social development that was pragmatically framed without any explicit theoretical or ideological foundations –​ see Box 5.2 (International Labour Organisation (ILO), 1976). In the 1970s the Basic Needs Approach found passing favour with the World Bank and more generally within the international development community (Overseas Development Institute (ODI), 1978; Streeten et al, 1981; Wisner, 1988), but was soon displaced by neo-​liberal influences favouring structural adjustment programmes that prioritised economic growth above social policy.

Box 5.2:​The International Labour Organisation’s pragmatic definition of ‘basic needs’ Basic needs … include two elements. First, they include certain minimum requirements of a family for private consumption: adequate food, shelter and clothing, as well as certain household equipment and furniture. Second, they include essential services provided by

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and for the community at large, such as safe drinking water, sanitation, public transport, and health, education, and cultural facilities. A basic-​needs-​oriented policy implies the participation of the people in making the decisions which affect them through organisations of their own choice. … It is important to recognise that the concept of basic needs is a country-​specific and dynamic concept. The concept of basic needs should be placed within a context of a nation’s overall economic and social development. In no circumstances should it be taken to mean merely the minimum necessary for subsistence. Source: ILO, 1976: 32

Bradshaw was making an important practical point about the different ways in which policy makers, social administrators and service providers decide to interpret human need. He presented a simple taxonomy of social needs (see Table 5.1). By social needs he was referring to needs that are in various ways socially interpreted. He distinguished between four kinds of need. First, he identified normative needs, and here he was referring not to need defined by cultural or customary norms, but to the judgements made by experts and welfare professionals as to what people might ‘normally’ and legitimately need and what services should be provided. When we discuss poverty in Chapter 7 we shall encounter some of the different ways in which experts have sought to define basic needs are and where, for example, to draw a poverty line, threshold or standard below which people may be said to be in need. And those professionally involved, for example, in community development will exercise sometimes subtle elements of normative power when assisting a community to identify its needs (Ife, 2013). Second, Bradshaw identified felt need, by which he was referring to what people might subjectively believe they need. Bradshaw is not concerned with philosophical arguments as to whether people’s feelings can disclose real needs as opposed to mere ‘wants’. He was asserting the relevance of how people feel about the services they should have. In Chapter 7 we shall encounter the ways in which poverty or deprivation thresholds have also been formulated using survey techniques to determine the popular consensus as to what people feel to be necessities. Third, Bradshaw identifies expressed needs:  the things that people not only feel they need, but which they demand. Once again, Bradshaw is not making judgements about the distinction between needs and demands. He is merely pointing to the relevance of what people individually ask for, or what through voting, campaigning or other forms of participation they might collectively demand in terms of benefits and services. I shall return to discuss service user participation later in this chapter, and in Chapters 8 and 9 I shall be returning to consider the question of just how needs are translated into claims and claims into rights.

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Table 5.1: Bradshaw’s taxonomy of need: an interpretation Type of need

Basis of needs interpretation

How it is determined

normative need

expert judgement

by beneficent and/​or empathetic professionals

felt need

what people feel

by opinion surveys and/​or qualitative research

expressed need

what people demand

by elections/​petitions/​ participatory assessment

comparative need

what everybody else has

by social condition surveys and/​or service evaluations

Finally, Bradshaw identifies comparative needs: needs which may be said to arise when there is a shortfall or deficiency in the services received by one person or group and those received by another similarly placed person or group. At issue here are comparisons between people and what they are getting and an assumption that if a resource or service is unfairly distributed this may leave some people in relative need. In practical terms, policy makers can draw on a variety of data relating to social and economic inequalities and studies or procedures that evaluate existing public service provision in order to identify inequities or gaps that might be said to constitute unmet needs, requiring a response. Elements of this approach have been applied, for example, in a study of ‘unmet needs’ in the UK (Watts et al, 2009). Unless resources are available for the meeting of such needs, the idea of comparative or relative need when applied as a basis for service planning opens up a spectrum of potential objections. The concern in some quarters might be that an approach focused on comparative or relative needs could spiral out of control. On the one hand it could result in an endless and counterproductive inflation of expectations, such that the welfare state could never satisfy need. On the other hand, if resources are finite, such an approach will not be sustainable. The first of these points has been raised by Robert Goodin whose discussion of needs and wants we discussed in Chapter  4. Goodin (1990) has voiced a more particular concern in relation to the idea that societies should necessarily aim to maximise the provision of resources for the satisfaction of unmet relative need. In the nature of things, more means less. Goodin, like Bauman, contends that growing social inequality fuels dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction in turn drives up demand as people discover new unmet needs. If, assuming that basic needs can be met, policy makers are concerned to limit social and economic inequality, they should not seek to satisfy relative need by bringing everybody’s living standards up to the median. This will perversely serve to accelerate the growth in expectations and ratchet up the extent of inequality. Goodin argues, controversially, that to minimise the distribution of resources while distributing

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them on a uniform basis would be more equitable and is more conducive in the longer term to achieving an egalitarian society. Policy makers and social administrators themselves will usually have less principled objections and are usually more concerned to find ways to ration people’s access to limited resources. Rationing is a particular issue in developed countries when it comes to access to healthcare provision. Forder (1974; and see Chapter 3) has added to Bradshaw’s four categories of need what he calls ‘technical need’, which relates to needs for new and often expensive forms of provision that did not previously exist. Scientific and technological advances now mean that computers in schools, central heating (or air conditioning) in houses and the latest forms of medical treatment are all coming to be regarded as necessaries. Much of the literature on rationing has been developed in relation to access to medical care, where significant ethical issues can arise. Procedures once undreamt of such as heart transplants, hip replacements, advanced cancer treatments, IVF fertility treatment, gender reassignment are all now possible, but can’t necessarily be made available on demand within the budgetary constraints of publicly funded health provision. Not everyone’s comparative needs can be met. Radical critics of modern healthcare, such as Ivan Illich (1977), have argued that technologically created needs of this nature are not human needs at all. Access even to routine forms of service may in any event be rationed –​whether by formal or informal means –​if the time of welfare professionals or the money to pay for services are short (P. Foster, 1983; Klein et al, 1996). Participatory approaches The third of Bradshaw’s categories was ‘expressed’ need, and we have already alluded to the possibility that users of human services might give expression to their needs through various forms of participation. The ability to voice one’s needs and to participate in deliberative processes concerning the satisfaction of one’s needs may be regarded as a need in itself or, indeed, as a right of citizenship, and this will be a recurring theme in later chapters of this book. For now, however, we shall be touching upon issues relating to the application of participatory approaches to the assessment of need. Participation might be regarded as axiomatically desirable. However, the techniques for facilitating and managing consultation can work in a variety of different ways. Arnstein (1969) proposed a ‘ladder’ of participation with eight ‘rungs’ or levels of participation. The first rungs entail forms of participation that are not necessarily effective at all, since they are concerned with the ways in which service providers may seek to manipulate or change people’s opinions or behaviour, or else do no more than offer information. The next rungs promote purely tokenistic forms of participation, involving consultation exercises or placatory public meetings. The higher rungs of the ladder afford people varying

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degrees of power:  through partnership arrangements or delegation, whereby people may be co-​opted into decision-​making processes; or else, possibly, more direct and meaningful forms of citizenship control. The important insight here is that participation can potentially emancipate people and enable them to express their needs in ways that make a difference, or it can work to disempower them and re-​shape or silence their expressions of need. Mechanisms that purportedly allow public participation in substantive policy decisions, though they may be intended in part to permit direct engagement and/​or supervised ‘knowledge transfer’ between people and policy makers, may be devised with an array of other legitimising functions in mind (see R. Dean, 2017). It is sometimes contended (for example, Bochel & Bochel, 2004: Ch. 7; Croft & Beresford, 1992) that there are broadly speaking two overarching approaches to participation:  the democratic and the consumerist. While this distinction provides important insights, it can also confuse and/​or oversimplify. This is because each heading includes approaches with very different origins and because the techniques developed by one approach are often borrowed or colonised by the other. Democratic approaches can be traditional or ‘associative’; consumerist approaches can be community focused or market focused. And any of them may operate at different levels or on different ‘rungs’ of Arnstein’s ladder. Democracy has many variants (D. Held, 1987). The form of ‘classical’ democratic rule established in ancient Athens was in one sense radical, since it required every citizen to participate in his own governance. In practice, however, such participation was restricted to a patrician male elite and ignored the needs of women and slaves. Were it otherwise, as Aristotle (382–​322 bce) recognised, ‘in democracies the poor [would] have more power than the rich; for they are more numerous’’ (cited in D. Held, 1987: 19). Such a possibility has been frustrated by mediating the power of the masses through various kinds of electoral process. The spread of universal suffrage throughout the industrialised Western world and, more recently, beyond has clearly played an important part in empowering the working classes and enabling them to give expression to their needs (Bottomore, 1992), but representative democracy mediates power. Constitutional checks and balances, the power of the modern state and the arcane machinery of party politics can stifle, dilute or divert everyday expressions of need. Democracies have in some instances sought to legitimise decision making without recourse to electoral processes, through public consultation mechanisms. In large and complex societies, however, the issuing of consultation documents or the holding of public meetings are not necessarily effective means of consultation and can as easily disempower as empower the inarticulate or those who are not already effectively represented. Innovative mechanisms of democratic consultation and deliberation, such as popular referenda on specific policy issues or the organisation of citizen juries can also allow for the expression of need. But referenda may have consequences that are inimical to the needs

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of vulnerable minorities (see Box 5.3), and devices such as citizen juries have enjoyed mixed results (Beresford & Croft, 2001; Goodin & Dryzek, 2006). Furthermore, a study of public participation initiatives and service user forums in Britain concluded that the outcomes were not enough to sustain participation over time. Material and/​or institutional change was also necessary. The evidence … suggests that such change is not much in evidence as an outcome of new deliberative practices. For example … the impact that each of the ‘community governance’ initiatives [we studied] was having on mainstream service providers appeared limited. … this was in part because little power was invested in any of the initiatives: their status was almost exclusively advisory. (Barnes, et al, 2007: 201–​2)

Box 5.3:​Famous referenda: majority self-​interest versus minority needs California Proposition 13 –​ 1978 The state of California in the USA makes provision in its constitution for the holding of referenda. The constitution governs issues such as property taxes. Proposition 13 (the ‘People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation’) was successfully promoted in the 1970s by an association of property owners who objected, among other things, that property taxes levied in affluent districts subsided public services in poor districts. The proposition limited property taxes to 1 per cent of property values and restricted increases to 2 per cent per annum. Additionally, it limited the scope of state lawmakers to enact new taxes. The overall effect was to cut property taxes by 57 per cent. Local government services and public schools bore the brunt of the resulting cuts in public expenditure. Minority and poor communities were seen to be worst affected. Since Proposition 13, expenditure per pupil in Californian state schools has lagged behind that in the rest of the US. Private school enrolment increased for higher-​income families, and public schools in affluent districts have been able to top up funds through parental donations. The initiative presaged a wider tax revolt across the US and is widely thought to have contributed to Ronald Reagan’s election to the Presidency in 1980 (see D. Smith 1998). The US Supreme Court upheld the legality of the measure, and successive attempts to overturn or substantially modify it have been resisted. Supporters of Proposition 13 claim it made services more efficient and California more economically competitive. Opponents argue that this supposedly democratic initiative allowed the demands of higher and middle-​income property owners to trump the needs of less advantaged members of the community.

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Swiss Asylum Law Referendum –​ 2006 Switzerland is a country that allows citizens to petition for initiatives to instigate parliamentary legislation or for referenda to challenge it. Since the 1960s there have been six initiatives instigated by right-​wing political parties or groupings to limit the number of foreigners entering the country. These had always been defeated, not least because the Swiss economy was seen to depend on foreign workers. There have, nonetheless, been a succession of legislative changes to tighten immigration and asylum law in Switzerland, culminating in laws that have been criticised for their severity by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (https://w ​ ww.unhcr.org/u ​ k/)​ and by Human Rights Watch (http://​hrw.org). In 2006 a coalition of centre-​left parties, trade unions, churches and aid organisations petitioned for a referendum to oppose the asylum reforms. In the event, the referendum was lost and Swiss voters who had until then by a majority supported humanitarian principles and opposed the most draconian restrictions on refugees supported the reforms by a margin of almost 70 per cent. This outcome reflected the influence of the far-​right Swiss People’s Party which in 2007 went on to become the largest single party in Parliament (69 out of 246 members) and which has since campaigned to reinforce the deportation of foreign offenders, using an explicitly xenophobic, if not racist, poster depicting a herd of white sheep kicking a black sheep out from an enclosure bearing the Swiss emblem. The climate of opinion has clearly been changing in Switzerland. Direct democracy can result in decisions that, some would argue, violate the human rights of potentially highly vulnerable refugees.

The rise since the 1970s of civil-​society activism and new social movements (F. Powell, 2007; A. Scott, 1990) entailed challenges to traditional democratic methods and a discussion about a variety of more or less abstract radical alternatives (Keane, 1988; Walzer, 1983). Perhaps the most persuasive alternative was that characterised by Hirst (1994) as ‘associative democracy’ in which voluntary and self-​help groups would substitute for the kind of bureaucratic and unresponsive institutions spawned by traditional representative democracy. What emerged was an emphasis within new and emerging service user movements, voluntary organisations and self-​help organisations upon direct participation at community or ‘grass roots’ level (Hadley & Hatch, 1981) and a shift to greater pluralism in social policy approaches (Johnson, 1987). However, a proliferation and expansion of non-​governmental and civil society organisations does not of itself overcome the democratic deficit unless there are ways to ensure that the social entrepreneurs who lead such organisations are accountable and that their members are actively involved. These trends intersected with evolving practices in the sphere of social and community development. Traditional neo-​colonial approaches to social development in the global South and community development in deprived urban neighbourhoods

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of the global North had been premised on particular kinds of interpretive account of human need. The Basic Needs Approach alluded to earlier and adopted by social development agencies may be regarded as an example, though it might also be seen as a counterpart to the kind of urban community development work founded in England by the 19-​century University Settlements, such as Toynbee Hall and Cambridge House. The former involved Western aid workers seeking to identify and fulfil the basic needs and deficiencies suffered by culturally diverse populations. The latter involved (at first) well-​to-​do students and (later) middle-​class social workers interpreting the needs and social pathologies of deprived working-​class neighbourhoods (Cockburn, 1977: Ch. 4). The Basic Needs Approach gradually gave way to approaches based on the participatory assessment principles (Chambers, 1997; Narayan et al, 1999; World Bank, 2001), whereby attention was paid to the ways in which villages and communities in developing countries interpreted their needs. In countries like the UK, there were concerted attempts to ensure that large corporate-​style local authorities consulted with local communities over planning proposals and housing policies, to institute forms of neighbourhood management and promote community level initiatives for the management of social conflicts (Cockburn, 1977). Both these trends were double-​edged: they had potential for democratising the interpretation of need, but they were also essentially top-​down and technocratic in nature. Communities, as targets for intervention and actual or potential recipients of services were required to participate; to collaborate with the state; to be willing consumers of essential services. These technocratic tendencies gathered momentum towards the end of the 20th century and were increasingly inflected towards a more explicitly market-​ oriented form of consumerism, associated initially with attempts to ‘marketise’ social welfare provision; to make it more business-​like and to subject it to market-​like disciplines (Le Grand, 1990a). Increasingly, however, what has been described as the new public management (J. Clarke & Newman, 1997; Hood, 1991), sought to ‘modernise’ as much as marketise welfare services; a process that entails particular notions of partnership and participation. The principles of new public management could be seen at work in supranational bodies, such as the European Union and the World Bank (for example, Porter & Craig, 2004). The key to this ‘modernising’ trend is essentially de-​politicising: insofar as social policies are a response to needs, needs are defined in partnership with a range of non-​governmental, business, consumer and community organisations. The users of welfare services are constituted as ‘customers’, and the satisfaction of their needs can be guaranteed by customer charters; by quality assurance mechanisms, including complaints procedures, focus groups consultation exercises and customer satisfaction surveys. As with the more explicitly community-​oriented approaches to participation, the techniques involved are double-​edged: a well-​informed and well-​advised service user can make her needs known, but the participation of more vulnerable ‘customers’ may be at best tokenistic.

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Table 5.2: Expression through participation traditional democracy

associative democracy

community consumerism

market consumerism

potentially empowering

mediated participation through elections

direct participation through self-​help organisation

community self-​ governance/​ service-​user participation

customer charters and complaints procedures

ambiguous techniques

popular referenda/​ citizen juries

potentially disempowering

public consultation exercises

participatory needs assessment association membership/​ passive participation

manipulation/​ co-​option

consumer focus groups customer satisfaction surveys

This argument concerning the scope for the expression of need through participation is diagrammatically summarised in Table 5.2. It may be seen that overlapping ideas about participatory assessment of need lie at the core of the argument, but that in the context of prevailing debates, they can as readily be inflected towards practices that co-​opt, control and disempower as towards processes that liberate, enable or empower those whose needs are not met. Social and discursive constructions of need Finally in this section, there are social policy commentators who have sought to engage with social constructionist accounts of human need. We have referred to  Baudrillard’s and Bauman’s sociological accounts, which reduce human needs to mere constructs or symbols generated by consumer society. Similarly, there are writers  –​in what is called the post-​structuralist tradition  –​who have explored the ways in which the world around us acquires intersubjective meaning through the social discourses and practices of human beings; or, in other words, through the meanings that human beings generate and reinforce in the process of communicating with each other and acting upon their interpretations of the world around them. We can’t understand the truth about the world –​or so the argument goes –​only the ways in which we and our forbears set about making claims about truth. The best-​known theorist in this tradition was Michel Foucault (1977; 1979; and see for example, P. Fitzpatrick, 2005). Such theorists have done much to demonstrate the significance of social policies, institutions and the technologies of power and governance which underpin them. But they have tended not to focus, other than by implication, on concepts of human need.

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There have, nevertheless, been attempts to apply Foucaudian thinking to the ways in which social policy does not so much respond to as continually define and redefine human need. Social policy is implicated in our understanding of human need. This is especially the case when tests of need become conditions of entitlement (H. Dean, 1991; Squires, 1990). The workhouse test under the Poor Laws –​in Britain and across much of Western Europe –​was based on the principle of ‘lesser eligibility’: only if supplicants’ needs were so great that they were prepared to enter the workhouse and endure conditions less eligible (that is, more unpleasant) than those of the poorest independent labourer would they be allowed relief. As the Poor Laws were succeeded by modern social security systems, means-​tests replaced workhouse tests. Means-​tests entail more nuanced tests of need and more focused scrutiny of the supplicant. The specification of household requirements and conditions of entitlement entailed judgements about minimum living standards, living arrangements, familial dependency and work readiness. The making and administration of social policy confers the power to define need and to exercise control over the ways in which needs should be satisfied. It has been suggested that social policy that imposes constrained or alien interpretations of human need might more aptly be called ‘anti-​social policy’ (Squires, 1990). The social policy implications of the idea that human needs are socially or ideologically constructed have been considered in a rather different way by Martin Hewitt (1992). Hewitt draws on the psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan (1977). Lacan’s argument is that as human individuals our needs and desires interact with one another. Our real needs are obscured by imaginary needs (ideological misrepresentations), but it is through the symbols we use in everyday communication that we can, in communion with others, discover an evolving awareness of our true needs. Hewitt draws parallels between this argument and Habermas’ (1987) notion of the ‘ideal speech situation’: the possibility that in genuinely un-​coerced negotiation people would be able to recognise and agree upon their own and each other’s needs. Hewitt’s point is that social policy can’t ignore the relevance of competing ideologies to the interpretation of human need and that it is only through a negotiated process that we can discover or agree the nature of inherent human need. He acknowledges –​albeit only in a footnote (1992: 193) –​some similarity between this argument and Nancy Fraser’s notion of a ‘politics of needs interpretation’: a key concept to which this book will turn in Chapter 9. The theorised notions of need explored in Chapter  4 in fact require us to consider interpretive accounts and, in particular, the ways in which even theorists’ and philosophers’ views of inherent needs will in part be fostered, mediated, obscured or distorted through the conditions of everyday life. It is in the ‘moral repertoires’ of everyday life that ordinary understandings of human need are generated (Dean with Melrose, 1999). The anthropologist Mary Douglas (1977) has pointed to the natural symbols of everyday existence that are shaped over the

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course of history and within the individual life-​course. She explains these in terms of the reference ‘grids’ by which we classify the world and the strength of the social ‘groups’ to which we belong develop and change. Douglas’ grid/​group analysis can be applied in ways that help us account for the complex and contradictory understandings of human welfare that are reflected in popular discourse (Dean with Melrose, 1999; and see Chapter 6). All human beings are different, but they interact through language and forms of expression (or ‘discourse’) by which we achieve our view of social reality. And though they may interpret need differently, there is scope for shared and common interpretations of need; for intersubjective understandings grounded in everyday life and practices (Lefebvre, 2014).

Insurgent claims making And it is in the practices of everyday life that ‘bottom-​up’ claims based on everyday experience originate. Though we shall return to the relationship between needs, rights and citizenship in later chapters, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the interaction between dominant understandings and subordinate experiences of need and needing; of instances in which –​to employ metaphors used by Nancy Fraser (1989: 171) –​the informal language of needs from subordinated ‘enclaves’ can ‘runaway’ or ‘leak out’ into official or dominant discourse. Other writers have reflected more explicitly upon the practices by which such processes in fact occur though deliberate practices of insurgency. Writing about the emergence of peripheral urban settlements –​or favelas –​in Latin America, Holston (2009) discusses the informal means by which the squatters asserted needs-​based claims against authority and exacted some measure of control over their living conditions, describing such processes as the enactment of ‘insurgent citizenship’. An example of the struggles associated with just one such settlement is described in Box 5.4, although squatting as a more or less subversive means of satisfying housing need has been extensively practised throughout history and throughout the world, both in the global South (Hardoy & Satterthwaite, 1989) and the global North (Bailey, 1973).

Box 5.4: Brasília Teimosa (‘Stubborn Brasilia’) squatter settlement The Brasília Teimosa settlement was one of the most famous and longest surviving favela in Brazil. Situated just outside the city of Recife on the Atlantic coast over 1,300 miles from the modern inland capital of Brazil, Brazilia, its name was mischievously coined in the period, 1957–​60, during which that architecturally ambitious capital city was being constructed. The name is an ironic reflection upon the contrast between the

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magnificence of the distant capital and the squalor of a coastal favela. But it is also a statement of the extraordinary resilience of the favela’s inhabitants in their stubborn resistance to successive eviction attempts, by police, City Hall and the State Federation of Fishermen (to whom the Government once granted rights to develop a fishing base, but who had sought instead to develop a yacht club). The site of the settlement is a plot of land reclaimed from the sea in 1934, originally for the purposes of a fuel depot for the Port of Recife, albeit that this was never developed. The empty barbed-​wire protected site was initially occupied by a handful of homeless households but despite attempts to displace them, the population swelled with an influx around 1947 and again in 1957–​58 when drought displaced large numbers of rural migrants. Their timber makeshift shelters, built on stilts, were periodically destroyed by police, but then rebuilt by the residents. During the 1960s, residents began to self-​organise (partly under the influence of a liberation theology inspired Catholic missionary), demanding infrastructure and legal tenure. But promises to develop the site and provide permanent housing came to nothing. In the 1970s further unsuccessful attempts were made to evict settlers in order to develop the site for tourism. The Council of Residents responded by developing its own Community Urbanization Project, forged on the basis of popular participation and pursued through vibrant public campaigning against resistance on the part of the public authorities. Early in the 1980s some 2,500 families received documents purporting to give them a right to their homes, though these turned out to be legally invalid. In 1982 and again in 1986 and 1989, certain groups of residents were relocated to other neighbourhoods in order to remove their stilt dwellings and make way for the redevelopment of the seafront. However, no substantive redevelopment occurred, and new waves of settlers moved in to replace those who had left. Eventually, however, in 2004, the Federal Government imposed a major redevelopment programme, replacing the stilt dwellings, relocating some of the residents and turning the seafront over to provision for tourists. Though a few members of the descendants and successors of the original squatter community remain, Brasília Teimosa has now become a trendy middle-​class neighbourhood, adjoining the exclusive development of Boa Viagem. Sources: Hardoy & Satterthwaite (1989:  32–​4); Fortin (2014); and information helpfully provided by Camila Souza.

A similar notion is captured by the anthropologist James Scott, who coins the term ‘infrapolitics’:  a disguised form of subversion specifically attributable to subordinate groups. In a study of the lives of Malaysian tenant farmers he observed the tactical use of ‘weapons of the weak’ (1985); practices by which to subvert the power of landowners and the authorities, such as petty

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pilfering, deliberate delays or artful deception. Scott later expanded on this theme to consider historical and other evidence for past tactics employed by serfs, slaves and untouchables; for the ‘hidden transcripts’ (1990) through which discourses of resistance have always been fomented; for the practices by which unmet needs were unlawfully satisfied, such as poaching and squatting. As Foucault observes, ‘Where there is power, there is resistance’ (1979: 95), and yet the ‘infrapolitics’ of which Scott speaks is largely hidden or disguised and insofar as it may on occasion leak out and become visible, it offers the target or handle against which dominant power can be reasserted. Jordan (1993) has contended that strategies of resistance on the part of those who are structurally disadvantaged too often prove counterproductive. Like the persecuted poachers of a previous era, the minority of social assistance benefit claimants in England who, feeling betrayed by a welfare state that once promised decent work in good times and sufficient support in bad, therefore supplement their incomes through undeclared informal employment. But they do so, by and large, in fear of detection and prosecution: theirs is a conservative form of resistance that while serving to satisfy unmet everyday needs, amplifies their sense of chronic insecurity (Dean & Melrose, 1997). In response to a debate within academic social policy as to the scope for agency on the part of poor and powerless people, Paul Hoggett (2001) draws out a distinction between first and second order agency: between, on the one hand, the limited agency associated with resilience and self-​help coping strategies and, on the other, the kind of agency that entails ‘speaking out’ and protest in pursuit of change. When powerless people push back not by clandestine means but through ‘disorderly’ public protest, the effects can be even more counterproductive (for example, Roberts, 2011). Yet in practice, the authenticity of second order agency may be compromised when its organisation is dependent upon facilitation by community activists, civil society organisations or beneficent welfare professionals. Nevertheless, there are instances in which insurgent needs-​based claims can be translated into lasting social policy gains as when squatters are granted legal title, when landowners will grant concessions, when public services respond to rumbles of popular protest, or when governmental policies are incrementally amended in light of subliminal discontent. The ambiguously empowering potential portended by ‘the participatory turn in governance and service delivery’ (Barnes, 2009: 47) that is discussed earlier provide ‘invited spaces’ (Cornwall, 2004) in which the expression of needs-​based claims may be permitted and can on occasions effectively disclose hidden transcripts and allow subversive voices to be heard (Barnes & Prior, 2009). Insurgent claims making can most often be seen in relation to the need for basic subsistence and shelter, but there are instances in which struggles over other needs can erupt into direct action –​see, for example, Box 5.5.

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Box 5.5:​The Burston Strike School The Burston School strike –​credited as the longest strike in British history –​was led by the children of the rural Norfolk village of Burston in protest at the sacking of their teachers, Kitty and Tom Higden, and in support of the right to the caring and emancipatory style of education offered by the Higdens. The strike began in 1914 when, with the approval of the Norfolk Education Committee, the Higdens were dismissed from their posts at the village’s Church of England school. The Rector and the School Managing Body, composed of well-​to-​do farmers, had taken exception to the Higdens’ demands for better conditions and facilities in the school, to the liberal nature of their teaching regime and their resistance to the farmers’ unlawful practice of forcing their labourers’ children to work in the fields at harvest time. When the Higdens were replaced at the school, all but a handful of their pupils participated in noisy demonstrations and refused to attend. With the support of the children’s own parents, the village community and, eventually, the wider trade-​union movement, an alternative strike school was established, first in a tent on the village green, then in a disused carpenter’s workshop, and following a national fundraising appeal, in purpose built premises that opened in 1917. In the course of the strike several of the children’s parents were prosecuted and fined for failing to send their children to the recognised Church of England school and others were dismissed by the farmers who employed them and evicted from their tied accommodation. Yet the strike held firm. The strike school continued to educate Burston children until 1939 (when Tom Higden died and Kitty was too old to continue). The building now stands as a museum that commemorates a 25-​year bottom-​up struggle which revolved, in essence, not around labour or housing issues, but around substantive educational need. Sources: https://​burstonstrikeschool.co.uk/​ and see, for example, Scobie (1991). The story is also told in a BBC film, The Burston Rebellion, made in 1985, and a forthcoming film, Burston, by OHMO Entertainment UK.

Conclusion/​Summary This chapter has: • Discussed those understandings of human need that are based in the practices of everyday life; on the interpretation of social processes; on the ways in which need is experienced or constructed. • Considered accounts which claim to show how:

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◊ human societies evolve in ways that generate customary needs: observable norms and expectations about how people should live, what they should do and how they should appear; ◊ capitalism has generated a distinctive set of expectations and perverse signals that produce distorted understandings of need; ◊ in particular, the development of ‘consumer society’ in affluent countries attaches primarily symbolic meanings to the things people consume and so generates what might be regarded as illusory needs. • Examined interpretive approaches within social policy, noting that: ◊ these have in the first instance been pragmatically focused on the ways in which policy makers and policy analysts can respond to social norms and expectations and how they decide which needs matter; ◊ among the things to emerge has been debate concerning participatory approaches to determining human needs and the extent to which people are enable or prevented from giving effective expression to their own interpretations of need; ◊ there are also related theoretical contributions from different social science disciplines regarding the social and discursive construction of need and the manner in which intersubjective understandings of human need are generated. • Discussed some of the ways in which everyday experiences of need may be reflected in insurgent needs-​based claims, in strategies of resistance or subversion, and in direct action in pursuit of needs satisfaction.

Challenging questions 1. If human needs are culturally relative, does that mean they are no more than social artefacts or mere fictions of our imagination? 2. How should social policy makers set about interpreting the needs of a human population?

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6 Human need and social policy

This chapter will:

• •

present an analytical taxonomy or classification of dominant approaches to human need; apply and adapt the taxonomy in relation to its past and present applications of needs categories within social policy, and examine how different understandings of need and needing are reflected within prevailing ideologies and different kinds of welfare regime.

This chapter will bring together the threads of the various arguments about human need that have been presented so far. This serves a somewhat specialised purpose. Of particular interest of some scholars is how to relate different approaches to, or understandings of, human need to the development of social policy. The taxonomy developed in this chapter encompasses the range of approaches so far discussed within four broad categories, each of which resonates with aspects of policy discourse, and which may also be reflected and supported by popular discourse. Insofar as we shall be drawing on specific historical and contemporary examples of social policy provision, these will be illustrative, rather than exhaustive. The aim is not exactly to describe or prescribe different approaches in social policy, but to understand how competing premises and assumptions about human need are reflected in the ways they have been and/​or are currently being constructed. We shall be addressing the possibility of future alternatives in Chapter 9.

A taxonomy of needs-​based approaches The object of the taxonomy as outlined in Figure 6.1 is not to add another layer of complexity to the argument, but to simplify or at least clarify the variety of conceptual distinctions already discussed and to locate them in relation to each other. The taxonomy is no more than a model. Though it is reductive, its purpose is heuristic: to help us make sense of an otherwise bewildering plethora of intersecting ideas and debates. In real life, approaches to human need seldom fit neatly into one of the categories defined here: they are likely to straddle more

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Figure 6.1: A taxonomy of needs-​based approaches THEORISED NEEDS economistic approaches (needs are particular)

socially ‘reformist’ approaches (needs are universal)

THIN NEEDS

THICK NEEDS moral-authoritarian approaches (needs are circumstantial)

paternalistic approaches (needs are common)

PRACTICAL NEEDS

than one. The categories are ideal types, and not necessarily accurate descriptions of any particular approach. When we first addressed the significance that may be inferred from different responses to need in Chapter 1, we considered four broad colloquial or vernacular categories –​the ‘economistic’, ‘moralistic’, ‘paternalistic’ and ‘socially reformist’ approaches. These categories were inferred not as expressly reasoned points of view but as caricatures of the repertoires to be observed within casual popular discourses. The categorisation was informed in part by a previously conducted study of popular discourse that had explored the ways in which a diverse sample of individuals made sense of and talked about their place as citizens in an unequal society (in this instance, the UK) and of the discursive ‘moral repertoires’ upon which they were observed to draw (Dean with Melrose, 1999). Now, however, the four categories identified in Chapter 1 are ordered around two axes, to provide a two-​dimensional schema or model. The first, the vertical axis, represents the distinction this book has drawn between theorised (or ‘top-​down’) and practical (or ‘bottom-​up’) conceptions of need. The second, the horizontal axis, represents the distinction that has been drawn between thin and thick conceptions of need. It is important to emphasise that both axes represent continua or spectra of interdependent understandings and have been drawn specifically with the purposes of the discussion in this book in mind.1 The theorised-​practical distinction is intended to capture the difference between the idea that human need is inherent to personhood and the idea that human need is located in everyday experience. The two cannot be wholly dissociated since they will inevitably feed off each other. Mary Douglas’ influential concept of ‘grid’ –​which captures the relative extent to which people in any culture may

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be bound by shared classifications and structures –​equates, albeit loosely, with my theorised-​practical continuum. Theorised conceptions of need implicitly or explicitly require some concept or doctrine of personhood, while practical conceptions are more pragmatic or grounded in everyday human experience. Habermas (1987) similarly distinguishes between ‘system’ and ‘life-​world’; Lefebvre (1991; 2014) between ‘abstract’ and ‘social’ spaces; Galtung (1994: 57) between ‘structure-​dependent’ and ‘actor-​dependent’ needs; the European Foundation for Social Quality (Baers et al, 2005; W. Beck et al, 1997) between the realm of ‘systems, institutions and organisations’ on the one hand and that of ‘communities and groups’ on the other. These variously drawn distinctions all equate or resonate in some way, albeit in some instances with some degree of ambiguity, to our distinction between theorised and practical conceptions of need. What these models all share is that the distinctions they draw are not simple binary distinctions. They are attempts to describe dialectically related conceptions. What we are addressing as theoretical conceptions of need can in some instances, though abstract, be crude or naïve; practical conceptions; though pragmatic, can be elaborate and sophisticated; and, of course, vice versa. In a historical sense there is fluidity of meaning between the poles of the theoretical-​practical continuum and each kind of conception has been, or may become, indebted to the other for its own meanings. The thin-​thick distinction –​as here conceived –​is intended to capture the difference between needs associated with the survival and personal utility of individual beings and those concerned with the fulfilment and accomplishment of social beings. Once again, it is a conceptual distinction that is not always easy to sustain because the opposite poles of the continuum are often informed by and dialectically interact with each other. It is a conceptual distinction that is consonant with other conceptual insights, such as the classic distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia, which has been quite extensively discussed in Chapter 3. However, the thin-​thick continuum also resonates, for example, with Mary Douglas’ concept of ‘group’, which is concerned with the extent to which people are socially isolated or incorporated; with Galtung’s distinction between material and non-​material needs; with the European Foundation on Social Quality’s (EFSQ) distinction between ‘micro-​biographical’ and ‘macro-​societal’ processes. It may be seen that our four colloquial approaches to human need are associated or aligned with four kinds of need: economistic approaches with ‘particular’ needs; the moralistic approaches with ‘circumstantial’ needs; paternalistic approaches with ‘common’ needs; socially reformist approaches with ‘universal’ needs. Particular needs First, therefore, we turn to the top left-​hand quadrant in Figure 6.1, in which need is thinly conceived but theorised as inherent to the economic subject. The

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approach to need is economistic in the sense that the subject it envisages is homo œconomicus (see Chapter 4) and because it takes seriously the wants and preferences that people express, when given the freedom to choose. It is a utilitarian approach, but not in the ‘classical utilitarian’ or Benthamite sense that demands the qualified freedom of the individual subject in the interest of the greater good, but in the economistic ‘preference utilitarian’ sense (see Hare, 1981) that assumes that people are hedonically motivated, utility maximising actors exercising rational choice in pursuit of self-​interest. It entails inherent conceptions of need in the sense that the individual is constructed as an economic actor who functions as a producer and consumer within a market environment. The person is defined by her individuality, and her needs are personal; they are particular to her, her interests, desires and personal identity. In the study of popular discourse mentioned earlier, one of the discursive ‘moral repertoires’ upon which people were observed to draw was the entrepreneurial repertoire. The entrepreneurial moral repertoire assumes that those in society who are deprived have experienced performative failure. Some people will fail because they are less able or less hard-​working than others; others because they are denied the opportunity to develop their unique skills or abilities. The maxim is ‘May the best person win’, but competition should always take place on a level playing field. Everybody should have the chance to succeed; to realise their particular abilities and ambitions. Entrepreneurialism is liberal individualist. From this perspective the space in which the enterprising must compete in order to pursue their well-being is a risky one, and it is foreseeable that not everyone’s needs will be fully met. Circumstantial needs We turn next to the bottom left-​hand quadrant in Figure 6.1, in which need is thinly conceived and practically interpreted. This encompasses what has previously been referred to as moralistic or moral-​authoritarian approaches. They are moralistic (rather than ‘ethical’2) in the sense that they assume first, that the baseness (actual or potential) of human nature must be constrained by authority and second, that judgements must be made about what people deserve. They are quintessentially hedonic and, in a Benthamite rather than an economistic sense (see earlier), utilitarian. They entail interpretation in the sense that needs are seen to arise and are evaluated in relation to the specific context and an individual’s personal circumstances. Needs are circumstantial. People who satisfy circumstantial needs are survivors. In the study of popular discourse mentioned earlier, one of the discursive ‘moral repertoires’ upon which people were observed to draw was the survivalist repertoire. The survivalist moral repertoire assumes that those in society who are deprived have experienced bad luck. The maxim is ‘Everyone for her- or himself ’. Everybody must get by as

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best they can. To survive you have to be strong, smart or street-​wise. But bad things happen. And though survivalism is fatalistic in terms of its attitude to the vicissitudes of everyday life, it is also morally authoritarian. In the struggle for survival there have to be rules, and if you or I must go by the rules so must everybody else. Rules should be enforced. From this perspective it may be deduced that the space in which the strong can survive in spite of the hazards of the world can be unforgiving insofar as those who fail or are prevented from meeting their circumstantial needs. Common needs Thirdly, we turn to the bottom right-​hand quadrant in Figure 6.1, in which need is thickly conceived but practically interpreted. This encompasses what I have previously referred to as paternalistic approaches. They are paternalistic in the sense that human beings are regarded as being by nature vulnerable creatures in need of security and protection. They are thick interpretations in the sense that needs are situated axiomatically in their social context: security and protection are quintessentially social needs. There is a eudaimonic dimension to the way in which security is conceived, since it is not only physical security (protection against physical harm) but ontological security (protection through belonging) that is valued. But needs are interpreted in the act of meeting them –​by family or community elders, by sovereign protectors, by representative brokers and/​or by benign policy makers. Needs, by definition, are held in common with others. People who satisfy common needs share common vulnerabilities as members of a particular society. In the study of popular discourse mentioned earlier another of the ‘moral repertoires’ upon which people were observed to draw was the conformist repertoire. The conformist moral repertoire assumes it is inevitable that some people in society will end up deprived. The maxim is ‘The poor shall always be with us’, and we must have compassion for the poor. It is by accepting our place within and our obligations to the social order that we ensure that everybody who belongs to that order is best protected from the risks of deprivation. Conformism is socially conservative. From this perspective it may be deduced that the space in which vulnerable or hard-​pressed individuals must conform so as to have their common needs met is potentially repressive and neglectful of the diversity of need. Universal needs Finally, we come to the top right-​hand quadrant in Figure 6.1, in which need is thickly conceived but theorised as inherent to the human subject. This encompasses socially reformist approaches, informed by some sense for social justice, though this may extend in one direction towards liberalism with a social

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conscience and on the other to social democratic reformism. Such approaches can be described as humanistic in that they purport to prioritise human wellbeing in a universal sense, but this does not necessarily mean that they embrace Marxist humanism and the identification of human need with the radical essence of our species being (see Chapter 2). Needs are nevertheless thickly conceived, in that the approach values not only personal freedom and formal equality but personal fulfilment and substantive social equalities. The human subject is nevertheless construed neither as a passively vulnerable being, nor primarily as an economic actor, but as a social actor, invested by virtue of her human status and her membership of society with certain constitutive or universal needs. People are to be regarded as citizens, whether citizens of a particular welfare state (T.H. Marshall, 1950) or even global citizens (D. Held, 1995). In the study of popular discourse mentioned earlier the last of the ‘moral repertoires’ upon which people were observed to draw was the reformist repertoire. The reformist moral repertoire considers it an injustice that some people in society should remain deprived. The maxim is ‘Social justice for all’. The demand is for greater substantive equality in society and for fairness in the distribution of resources. From this perspective it may be deduced that the space in which our lives are lived may be justly structured to reformist ends in order to satisfy universal needs (though possibly, critics would claim, at the expense of individual autonomy).

Human needs and welfare ‘regimes’ So, how have these competing needs-​based approaches been reflected in the history of social policy provision? The story is one of complex compromises. The development of Poor Laws in the Renaissance era across much of Europe began as a process of state regulation of charitable provision for the unmet needs of poor and disadvantaged persons, a process that evolved in the Industrial Era into methods of modern social administration. In that process, a variety of influences were brought to bear (for example, H. Dean, 2018: 231–​5). Charitable poor relief administered at local level largely through the Church cast the recipients as supplicants, subject to paternalistic compassion or to moralistic judgement, and here competing religious doctrines had some part to play. However, the major social upheavals that attended the coming of industrialisation created new patterns of need, giving rise to the ‘Social Question’; or, more precisely, how to attend to the consequent risks occasioned by a mass wage-​labour system. This led, on the one hand, to more fiercely moralistic treatment of Poor Law supplicants, but on the other to a strategic consensus between paternalistic conservatives and socially reformist liberals favouring a variety of state-​sponsored social insurance mechanisms. The priority for social administrators and policy makers was now the security and health of workers rather than supplicants.

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In the period between the First and Second World Wars and thereafter, the development of what are now referred to as ‘welfare states’ occurred in countries throughout the global North, whereby constitutional provisions and/​or social policies were directed increasingly to the universal needs of not only workers, but citizens. Beginning perhaps in the 1970s, however, a period of accelerating economic globalisation was accompanied by the rise of a neo-​liberal economic orthodoxy favouring selective social spending focused on particular needs, an emphasis on self-​provisioning where possible and upon new modes of public service in relation to which citizens are framed as consumers with their own particular needs and interests. This complex mixture of influences and approaches has contributed to shaping a variety of welfare state ‘regimes’, each of which potentially reflects different priorities and understandings of human need. On the basis of the empirical measures of de-​commodification and social stratification, Gøsta Esping-​Andersen (1990), has generated a celebrated taxonomy of such welfare regimes in which he distinguishes between ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’ and ‘social democratic regimes’. In Figure 6.2 I present a related but different taxonomy, which incorporates four rather than three regimes. As ever, this taxonomy is no more than a heuristic device intended to assist understanding of a complex reality, by mapping an analysis of needs-​based approaches onto the past and current types of welfare regime within which such approaches have been, or may now be, manifest. The horizontal axis or dimension in the diagram represents a continuum between individualistic and Figure 6.2: A taxonomy of welfare regimes: their assumptions, principles and priorities PRINCIPLES OF EQUALITY

liberal regimes prioritise particular needs

social democratic regimes prioritise universal needs

INDIVIDUALISTIC ASSUMPTIONS

SOLIDARISTIC ASSUMPTIONS asocial conservative regimes respond to circumstantial needs

social conservative regimes prioritise common needs

MAINTENANCE OF ORDER

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solidaristic assumptions or objectives; between competing demands for liberté on the one hand and fraternité on the other. The vertical axis represents a continuum between principles of equality and the maintenance of social order; between competing demands for egalité on the one hand and la paix social on the other. The ‘liberal’ and ‘social democratic’ categorisations are broadly commensurate with those of Esping-​Andersen, albeit that liberal social reformist approaches are more likely to fit within the social democratic category than the liberal category. The ‘social conservative’ category in this taxonomy is broadly commensurate with Esping-​Andersen’s conservative category, while the ‘asocial conservative’ fourth category is an allusion to the moralistic Poor Law regimes that preceded the modern welfare state, but whose legacy often survives within certain social administrative practices. There are no extant examples of any one of these posited welfare regimes, since every welfare regime is a hybrid and represents the outcome of fluid processes of development in which compromises are struck between competing logics and priorities, reflecting or distilling the outcomes of struggles for power. The model serves, potentially, as an aid to grasping the ‘ungraspable’ complexity (Sum & Jessop, 2013) of the ways in which competing needs-​based approaches may be incorporated into policy making and the ‘clumsy solutions’ (Verweij & Thompson, 2006) achieved by diverse welfare regimes. With that in mind, we can proceed to the categories of need we have identified and how they are addressed within different types of welfare regime. Promoting particularity in practice: liberalism There are, broadly speaking, three responses attuned to particular need: means-​ testing, which has a long history; policies to promote what in current jargon is called ‘human capital development’, though such policies also have a history; and, more recently, equal opportunities policy. The beginnings of systematic means-​testing, arguably, may be traced to the Speenhamland system in late-​18th-​century England. The Speenhamland system entailed a crude measure based on the number of loaves of bread a family of any given size might need in order to survive (see discussion in Chapter 7). However, as a way of ‘targeting’ assistance where it is most needed, means-​testing has developed into an often finely tuned technique and an essential feature of social policy intervention (H. Dean, 2015). Means-​testing is generally associated with the administration of social assistance safety nets (Dixon, 1999; Walker, 2005), though it is also widely used as a method of rationing the distribution of other sorts of assistance, whether in cash (examples range from student maintenance to home improvement grants) or kind (examples range from free medical prescriptions to social care provision). Means-​testing attracts a variety of criticisms. In practice it can be deeply unpopular, because it is tainted by association with the circumstances under which the technique has

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been developed. Modern social assistance schemes are the direct successors of the Poor Laws, and in some countries the transition has been partial or incremental. In many instances the application of a means-​test to determine eligibility for social assistance could not easily be dissociated from application of a workhouse test to determine whether a supplicant deserved to receive relief without admission to the workhouse. A test to ascertain particular needs can be made to look just as intrusive and stigmatising as a test of circumstantial needs (discussed later), especially if it entails intimate scrutiny of one’s daily living arrangements and personal means. Social policy commentators have also argued that means-​testing is administratively complex on the one hand and socially divisive on the other: there is an inherent danger that means-​tested provision reserved for the poorest in society will tend to become an inferior or second-​rate service (A. Deacon & Bradshaw, 1983; Titmuss, 1974). Nonetheless, supporters of means-​testing claim it is efficient. In countries such as Australia which rely principally upon means-​tested forms of social security provision –​set at relatively generous levels –​it is claimed that means-​testing need not be stigmatising (Castles & Mitchell, 1993). And at the global level, the so-​called ‘Washington consensus’ (Williamson, 1990) adhered to by the principal international financial institutions contends that means-​tested safety nets are the only kind of provision that is affordable in the poorest countries of the world. ‘Human capital’ is a lately fashionable concept that we encountered in passing in Chapter 4 when discussing the ways in which these same international financial institutions also appear to be appropriating and, arguably, misinterpreting Sen’s notion of human capabilities. This conflation of concepts is possible in part, perhaps, because human capital is a concept explored by sociologists (for example, Bourdieu, 1997) as well as economists. The term itself was originally coined by Adam Smith (1776) to refer to the stock of skills and knowledge possessed by the wage labourer. Welfare economists such as Pigou (1928 –​and see Chapter 3) used the term in a narrow utilitarian sense to refer to investment in personal productive capacity, but Becker (1993) firmly established the concept within standard economics to encompass the idea that public investment in individual education, training and healthcare amounted to an investment in productive human capital. The distinctive form of social liberalism that informed the beginnings of the British welfare state at the start of the 20th century (D. Fraser, 2017) drew upon an implicit concept of human capital. The preoccupation of the era was the pursuit of national efficiency: to ensure the fitness of the nation’s human stock to compete. There was more to this than crass utilitarianism, since promoting the health and literacy of the population as a whole meant focusing upon particular needs. It required the development of dispensaries, clinics and maternity visiting services; properly regulated and inspected schools; hygienic and better supervised housing; forms of scrutiny and surveillance that reached into the particular spaces in which people lived out their lives (K. Ellis, 2000: 6–​7). There was a realisation

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that the productive capacity of the national stock was vested in individual human beings. This particular era was later superseded by the Keynesian/​Beveridgean strand of social liberalism. But the multi-​faceted policy regime associated with the so-​called ‘Third Way’ (Giddens, 1998) that came to the fore at the close of the 20th century encompassed not only a utilitarian work-​first approach, but also in several countries an explicitly human capital-​oriented approach to welfare-​ to-​work premised on post-​Keynesian ‘supply-​side’ economic principles. This amounted to a reversion to national efficiency principles, in the sense that the emphasis was on maximising the skills and productivity of the domestic labour force in order better to compete within a global economy. The human capital approach to welfare-​to-​work entailed attention to skills, motivational training, rehabilitation and support –​mediated, for example, through the ministrations of Personal Advisers. The attention given to education policy was similarly instrumentally oriented to human capital production. The revival of a particular human capital-​oriented approach to individual need has been associated with new kinds of conditionality in social welfare provision. This is not necessarily the brutal conditionality of the workhouse test, but a more constructive conditionality that seeks to tailor the terms upon which provision is made to a particular individual or family so as to enhance conditions for the creation of human capital. An example is the introduction of conditional cash transfer programmes in Latin America, where social assistance to poor families is made conditional upon the children of the families attending health clinics and going to school (Britto, 2006). This is an example of how ambiguous social policy interventions can be. Is this a response that couples the families’ circumstantial need for social assistance with the universal needs of the children for health and education provision? Or is it best understood as an intervention that targets the particular needs of children in poor households to develop their human capital? The third way in which social policy addresses particular need is through measures to promote equality of opportunity so as to ensure that people can participate on equal terms as workers, consumers and users of public services (including education), whatever their particular needs. In our discussion of recognition in Chapter 5 we considered the implications of human diversity for social policies’ ability to meet human need. The distinctively liberal solution to the particularity of need is to try and guarantee equality of access to jobs, goods and services. This may be attempted by legislating to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sex, ‘race’ and disability, and indeed sexuality and religion. The European Union requires its member states to implement such legislation (Geyer, 2000; Marlier et al, 2007). The disadvantage of such legislation is that remedies against discrimination must usually be pursued by means of individual forms of legal redress, a process that can be technically difficult, while delivering, at best, personal relief rather than systemic change. The creation in the UK of an Equality and Human Rights Commission explicitly links equality of opportunity issues to

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the human rights agenda. The implication is that particular needs associated, for example, with gender, ethnicity or disability are addressed within a framework of abstract principles and formal guarantees, which may or may not accord with the concrete experiences and substantive demands of women, minorities or disabled people. This is a discussion to which we shall return. Responding to circumstance in practice: asocial conservatism Such responses are those which pre-​dated the ‘modern’ welfare state, but which are still present in various aspects of contemporary social policy. The origins of such responses go back to the era of the Poor Laws. As mentioned earlier, laws relating to the control of the poor had been developed across medieval Europe and were subsequently adapted to accommodate the advent of industrial capitalism. As the role of the administrative state began to develop, such laws were intended to supplement or to regulate the provision of charity to people who, through dispossession or destitution, faced adverse circumstances. Although the exact provenance of the expression ‘cold as charity’ is unclear, its meaning is more than clear. It bespeaks a response to circumstantial need that is born not out of love, warmth or compassion, but cold calculation. In this respect there were in the 19th century two distinct policy innovations whose legacy endures. They are exemplified by the development in England of the Victorian workhouse under the ‘New’ Poor Law of 1834, and by the subsequent emergence of the social casework method pioneered by members of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), founded in 1869. The workhouse was not a 19th-​century invention since it had existed in a variety of guises under older versions of the Poor Laws. The agrarian revolution, by displacing people from the land, created circumstantial need in a highly visible form, and workhouses were one way of containing that need by hiding the poor from view under conditions that were sometimes compassionate and secure, sometimes punitive and squalid. However, the function of the workhouse under the New Poor Law was neither compassionate nor punitive, but the application of a coldly utilitarian logic. This has already been alluded to in our discussion of Benthamite utilitarianism. The new workhouse regime was centrally regulated and contrived to ensure that paupers be adequately nourished and hygienically accommodated, but that their lives should be harsher than those who were managing to survive outside the workhouse. This was achieved by way of forced (and sometimes wholly unproductive) labour for the able-​bodied; by the separation of children from parents and wives from husbands; by the imposition of a Spartan environment and unremitting daily routine (de Schweinitz, 1961). Though the workhouse shared with the prison certain forms of disciplinary ‘technology’ (Foucault, 1977), the workhouse was not the prison. Utilitarian logic entailed certain key binary distinctions, between the perishing and the dangerous

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on the one hand (L. Morris, 1994); between the deserving and the undeserving on the other (D. Fraser, 2017). Prison was for the dangerous; the workhouse for the perishing, that is to say, for the circumstantially needy. But among the perishing classes those who were undeserving were to be put to work, while those who were deserving of relief might, under certain circumstances, be considered for ‘out-​relief ’ (for assistance, that is, outside the workhouse). The job of distinguishing between the perishing and the dangerous (the innocent and the guilty) belonged to the criminal justice system. The job of distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving required a different kind of system, based on a new method. Such a method was found in a special kind of social casework developed by charity organisation societies, which sprang up not only in England, but in other European countries and the US. The object of charity organisation societies was to systematise charitable giving and ensure that philanthropic relief was efficient and effective, not indiscriminate. To this end, the middle-​class volunteers of the English COS worked not only to root out scroungers, but also to identify families that could be saved from destitution by judicious intervention. The COS, it has been said, was primarily concerned to prevent ‘not suffering, but sin’ (Stedman-​Jones, 1971: 271); to ensure that profligacy and idleness (among the poor) should never be rewarded and that even those in the most precarious of circumstances should be kept honest, thrifty and industrious. This was achieved by rigorous scrutiny, through visiting, interviewing and meticulous record-​keeping. These methods laid the foundations of social casework: a set of processes that could be applied to the provision of state administered as much as philanthropic relief; and a set of skills upon which the modern social work profession would in time be built (Younghusband, 1964). The workhouse is now a thing of the past, and social work is identified as the quintessential caring profession. And yet, certain of the social policy principles of the Poor Law era are enduring (Harris, 2007). Especially since the 1970s ‘crisis’ of the modern welfare state (Mishra, 1984), moral-​authoritarian approaches to need as a circumstantial phenomenon have been increasingly in evidence. Now, as then, there are two aspects of a person’s circumstances that are taken into account; her work status; and/​or her dependency status. In this context ‘work’ means labour market participation, and ‘dependency’ refers to state support. The centrality of work status is manifest in the mantra of the so-​called Third Way, as coined by the UK’s New Labour government in the late 1990s: ‘work for those who can, support for those who cannot’ (Department of Social Security, 1998: 3). The growing emphasis upon ‘work for those who can’ and on welfare-​ to-​work policies in many of the world’s developed economies (Lødemel & Trickey, 2000) led some critics to suggest we are witnessing a transition from the welfare state to the ‘workfare state’ (for example, Jessop, 2002). The transition, however, is complex, and it encompasses different approaches. Most importantly, there is

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a distinction between ‘work-​first’ and ‘human capital’ approaches to welfare-​to-​ work. The latter we have considered in relation to particular needs in the last section. The former, however, is an approach that insists that welfare recipients should work for their relief, or else that they should take any job –​however poorly paid and uncongenial –​or be denied relief. It entails a coercive form of conditionality. The approach is most commonly associated with workfare arrangements in the US, but elements of the approach are clearly in evidence elsewhere (Peck, 2001). The work-​first approach addresses nothing but a person’s work status and may potentially be as coercive as the workhouse. The centrality of dependency status is evident in several contexts. In some countries of the developed world (Gough et al, 1997) and in the developing world (Hall & Midgley, 2004) the administration of means-​tested social assistance may still be locally regulated and undertaken by professional social workers. People whose circumstances are such that they must depend on a state safety net are still subject to scrutiny by variations upon the social casework method. In other parts of the world (especially Anglophone countries), however, social work professionals are not concerned with the administration of social assistance, but the provision of personal social services for the most vulnerable and dependent people. While state provision for health, education and pensions, for example, are bedrock services to which all or most citizens are entitled, the personal social services are reserved for the more highly dependent:  for children at risk, disabled or frail elderly people in need of care from the state. In these countries social work has or had attained a particular professional status, based on training that included, among other things, a grounding in psycho-​therapeutic methods concerned not with purely circumstantial needs but needs inherent to the individual (Halmos, 1973). More recently that status has been to some extent compromised by the advent of a new managerialist approach to the administration of public services (J. Clarke & Newman, 1997). This managerialism can have a tendency to refocus the attention of the personal social services on circumstantial needs. In certain branches of the profession, social workers have been effectively reconstituted as ‘care managers’, responsible primarily for devising efficient care packages appropriate to the circumstances of the client and what she needs to survive. Safeguarding the common in practice: social conservatism We consider now the kinds of social policy that represent a response attuned to common need. The word ‘common’ refers, sometimes simultaneously, to that which is ordinary and that which is shared. Common need, like common sense, is woven from the threads of precedent and custom: it is culturally constructed (E. P. Thompson, 1993). The essence of commonality is shared heritage on the one hand and shared fortunes on the other. In social policy terms this is

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represented in at least three ways: through the traditions of noblesse oblige as the guarantee of social order; through the Catholic principle of subsidiarity; through the development of risk sharing forms of social insurance. The obligations of the medieval Sovereign, the feudal Lord and the established Church to the common people, because they were supposedly divinely ordained, were to be gladly accepted. They purported to be borne not of cold charity, but sincere concern for the lower social orders. The reality could be different. Nonetheless, such notions of responsibility provided the impetus for informal welfare provision and for an inconsistent patchwork of provision through Parish institutions. The influence and assumptions of the tradition survived the eclipse of aristocratic power and retained resonances within the expectations of a more or less deferent working class and the pretensions of an affluent but sometimes fearful middle class. The hope was that the common people would continue to look to their betters not directly for the satisfaction of their needs, but for the maintenance of the good order that guaranteed that such needs could properly be met. For example, when in England provision was first made in 1870 for universal elementary education, one of its primary purposes was held to be ‘the safe working of our constitutional system’ (Forster, 1870: 104–​5). Particularly important in Western Europe were principles and traditions –​both catholic in a literal sense and Catholic in a religious sense –​that placed great store on family and kinship networks as the foundations of an inclusive social order. The principle of subsidiarity –​which would resurface in European political discourse in the late 20th century (Geyer, 2000) –​asserted that for the maintenance of natural order and social solidarity responsibility for meeting needs should rest so far as practicable at the lowest possible level within the social hierarchy. Only if family could not provide should responsibility be accepted by other institutions. Family, therefore, was vested with considerable cultural and symbolic significance, and this continues to be reflected in pro-​family policies of conservative welfare state regimes (Esping-​Andersen, 1990). The most significant way in which common need has been met through modern social policy intervention occurred with the development of social insurance. This began at the end of the 19th century in Germany, whose Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, sought tactically to outmanoeuvre the organised labour movement by providing systems, in the first instance, for health and accident insurance (B. Gilbert, 1966). Social insurance would become the big idea of the 20th century. It was imitated, adopted or adapted in countries around the world and extended to cover the risk not just of sickness, but unemployment. By extending coverage to the ‘risk’ of old age (that is, retirement), social insurance provided the basis for financing state pension schemes. The intentions of the original social insurance schemes were to guard against political unrest and preserve social order. They succeeded precisely because they were capable of building and sustaining solidarity; of providing for needs held in common across the social classes. The

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popularity of the social insurance principle is enduring and rests to this day on people’s endorsement of the idea that having paid contributions into a common fund they are morally entitled to have their needs met (for example, H. Dean & Rodgers, 2004). Realising the universal in practice: social democracy As already indicated social policy responses to universal need are premised on principles of social citizenship, a concept that is in itself capable of a spectrum of interpretations. In practice, universal needs may be variously construed. There is near consensus between social liberals and social democrats, however, that health is a universal need of all citizens that may be met by centrally funded healthcare provision. Beyond this, however, the citizen can appear in different guises: the worker citizen, the dependent citizen and the future citizen (Dwyer, 2004; Lister, 2003). Provision for worker citizens has in practice been made primarily –​not by way of citizens’ or basic income schemes (Fitzpatrick, 1999) –​but by way of modified forms of social insurance provision (H. Dean, 2015; Walker, 2005). The enduring assumption is that most needs should be met through wages from paid employment and that the function of social policy is to provide replacement incomes when employment is interrupted. Beveridgean national insurance schemes have aimed to make modest but comprehensive provision, while preserving the fiction of an actuarial link between the contributions that workers pay during their working lives and the benefits and pensions they may receive in the event of unemployment, sickness, maternity or in retirement. In reality ‘pay as you go’ social insurance schemes can be extensively redistributive, and social insurance schemes in some countries –​especially the Nordic welfare regimes –​are deliberately contrived to be both inclusive and generous to the point where benefits are virtually universal. Dependent citizens, other than temporarily dependent workers, fare differently. Disabled people excluded from social insurance arrangements may receive contingent cash benefits to meet their income needs, social services to meet their care needs, and/​or other personal support to enable them to live independently. Citizens who provide unpaid care for disabled or frail elderly relatives may receive a contingent cash benefit. (There is a possibility that non-​working parents –​mainly mothers –​who care for children, so long as they do not engage with the labour market and must depend upon another wage earner, may temporarily cease in one sense to be ‘social’ citizens.) The needs of children as ‘future citizens’3 may be met partly by way of contingent cash transfers (child benefits or family allowances) paid in recognition that society shares a universal responsibility for the care of future generations (Land, 1975), through other forms of support for families and directly through childcare

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provision. Just as fundamentally, however, from a social reformist perspective, is children’s and young people’s need for education. Education is regarded not merely as an integrative function catering to common need, or as an instrument of human capital development catering to particular needs, but as a universal human need required for the development of the human personality (Nowak, 2001). The critics of universalistic social policy provision –​from both left and right of the ideological spectrum (see Drover & Kerans, 1993: Introduction; Illich et al, 1977) –​contend that it vests too much administrative power in the apparatuses of the state and affords too much discretionary power to welfare professions. Judgements about what is or what might be universal about human need are made at too great a distance from the citizen. This is a concern we shall address in Chapters 8 and 9.

Conclusion/​Summary In this chapter we have reduced the multiplicity of categorisations of human need to just four broad categories: • Circumstantial needs. These are needs that arise from everyday circumstances in a ‘dog eat dog’ world, in which everybody is expected to survive as best they can, while abiding by the rules. Provision for meeting circumstantial need is utilitarian and coercive in that assistance is conditional upon willingness to labour or upon a test of moral desert. • Particular needs. These are needs that are particular to the competitive economic actor. Provision for meeting particular need is precisely targeted; it seeks to promote personal human capital and to ensure formal equality of individual opportunity. • Common needs. These are needs that are shared in common. Provision for meeting common need relies upon the perpetuation of traditional responsibilities through which the social order is constituted, including familial responsibilities, while promoting the sharing of common risk through social insurance. • Universal needs. These are needs that are held to be universal to all. Provision for meeting universal need is based on concepts of social citizenship and the principle that the state should provide or secure access for every member of society to specific benefits, including healthcare, social security and education. These categories of need have been discussed in relation to the varying priorities of different kinds of welfare state regime.

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Challenging questions 1. Can we plausibly detect the influence of different conceptions of human need in different kinds of social welfare regime? 2. What business is it of social policy and the nation state to ensure that human needs are met?

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Part Two Implications and debates

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7 Unmet needs and social disadvantage

This chapter will consider processes by which social disadvantage occurs, namely:

• • •

differential access to resources for the meeting of material needs, resulting in poverty and/​or inequality; associated social divisions that result in social exclusion and misrecognition; dehumanising relations of power that result in alienation, oppression and exploitation.

Those whose human needs are not met experience social disadvantage. Except in cases of unforeseeable natural disaster, such disadvantage arises through the workings or dysfunctions of social, economic and political processes. The processes that generate disadvantage are to be understood in relation to those that generate advantage and by which for some, but not others, advantages are secured, accumulate, or may be amplified; or by which they may accrue to some at the expense of others (Dean & Platt, 2016). In Chapter 2 we briefly considered how in the Neolithic era the beginnings of an agricultural revolution would lead in time to increasingly hierarchical societies; how the subsequent development of settled ‘civilisations’ created human societies divided within themselves between rulers and subjects, and from one another by competing beliefs and territorial claims; how thereafter the industrial revolution began a process that generated inequalities of wealth and power not only within industrialised countries, but globally between nation states. Polanyi (1944) had argued that once upon a time the material provisioning by which the human species survived was embedded within the social relations of tribal and kinship networks. But when such provision was superseded by the processes of a market economy, he claimed that it became ‘disembedded’ from social processes. Certainly, within the last two centuries technological and economic changes have had massively disruptive consequences for social relations. But arguing for a different view of embeddedness, Granovetter (1985) suggests that economic activity nonetheless takes place in a social context and within social structures. It is in that context that advantage and disadvantage, privilege and deprivation, are experienced and

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take on social meaning. The consequences of the failings of economic or political processes are mediated by social processes and social divisions. Though they may be explained in abstract economic or political terms, advantage and disadvantage are axiomatically grounded in a social dimension and within social relations of power. For example, though poor people may die from malnutrition in times of famine, the rich never starve. Clearly, any human being is physically compromised or ‘disadvantaged’ if she is deprived of food, but that disadvantage has social significance when those with power and privilege have failed to foresee or mitigate the likelihood of famine or to instigate measures to distribute relief. In Chapter 3 we reflected on the ‘thin’ and the ‘thick’ of human needing, a distinction that only makes sense when the social character of advantage and disadvantage is considered.

Poverty and inequality: the distribution and accumulation of material resources Poverty and inequality are applied concepts that relate to substantive issues of resource distribution. However, they are both contested concepts precisely because they are inextricably connected with questions of human need and the processes by which needs may be met or go unmet. They are important concepts because they have furnished a variety of methods for quantifying and measuring the extent to which human needs are met or unmet. Both concepts and their related methodologies have been central to academic social policy and each has generated a huge body of literature, which this short section will not attempt to address in any depth. The purpose here is to outline conceptual connections, focusing on poverty and material absences, unacceptable material inequality and the relevance of poverty and inequality for the social component of human development. Poverty and material absences According to Sahlins (1974 –​see discussion in Chapter 2), in pre-​modern hunting-​ gathering societies there was no poverty. Human existence was sustainable because in relation to early humans’ frugal requirements, available natural resources were plentiful. There was no meaningful distinction between ‘the haves’ and ‘the have nots’, since everybody had nothing but could have whatever there was to be had. It was only as the human project evolved through the development of agriculture, the creation of political civilisations and the invention of economic processes that a distinction between ‘the haves’ and ‘the have nots’ acquired meaning. However, we know that idea of poverty and of ‘the poor’ is at least as old as Moses (circa 1571–​1407 bce) who declared that ‘the poor shall never cease out of the land’ (Deuteronomy 15: 11). And though poverty has been variously characterised, there is a sense in which it had often been regarded as an inevitable or, in part, normal feature of the human condition: a phenomenon to be tolerated or, possibly,

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regarded as a matter of compassionate concern (Lis & Soly, 1979). Neediness, for some people, was their lot in life. Just as coldness is the absence of heat, poverty is the absence of ‘wealth’ (Jacobs, 1969). Heat is a form of physical energy that is both generated by and fuels natural ecological processes, whereas wealth may be understood as metaphorical energy that is both generated by and fuels socio-​economic processes. The term ‘wealth’, when used in everyday parlance as an antonym for poverty, can refer to assets (in the form of material or financial resources) and/​or to regular monetary income (by which assured living standards may be maintained). Poverty is the absence of the material resources or goods necessary to sustain an ‘acceptable’ human life or the means to acquire such resources or goods. But of course the meaning of ‘acceptable’ will depend upon whether a thin or a thick interpretation of human well-being is adopted. Just as a declaration that ‘this water is cold’ could mean either that the water is freezing or that it is not warm enough for a comfortable bath, so poverty may be adjudged by different standards. To say that ‘this person is poor’ could mean that for want of food or the means of subsistence she is starving or malnourished, or else that she lacks the means to cope or fully to participate in the society in which she lives (George & Howards, 1991). So, when it comes to the measurement of poverty, what is measured is an absence of resources, based on a judgement as to what a person needs. Such a measurement may be used as the basis for the administration of poverty relief and/​or as the basis upon which statistically to determine or estimate the extent of poverty within a population. Perhaps the earliest example of the former is that which informed the Speenhamland system of relief in England in the late 18th century (see Box 7.1), whereas an example of the latter is the sophisticated Multidimensional Poverty Indicator currently used by the United Nations to estimate the extent of poverty in developing countries (see Box 7.2).

Box 7.1: The Speenhamland means-​test and the measurement of need Means-​tests are a way of measuring human need. The earliest systematic means-​test is thought to be that developed in 1795 by the magistrates of Speenhamland, a rural parish in Berkshire, England (de Schweinitz, 1961). The magistrates were responsible for the administration of poor relief and, at a time of economic recession when the cost of living was outstripping the level of agricultural wages, they elected to acknowledge the poverty of local farm labourers and their families by paying out of public funds a supplement to the labourer’s wages. To this end they drew up a ‘table of universal practice’ under which relief could be calculated in accordance with the estimated requirements

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of a labourer’s family. The difference between a man’s wages and the minimum held to be necessary for his family’s maintenance would be met from the poor rates. The scale on which relief was calculated was based on the cost of a gallon loaf of bread and upon the magistrates’ assumptions as to how many multiples of that sum were needed to sustain a family of any given size. The system was imitated throughout much of England, but eventually abolished by the Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834. Nonetheless, the table of universal practice established a rough-​and-​ready method for the measurement of need and the fundamental basis upon which poverty measures were developed later in the 20th century.

Box 7.2:​The UN Multidimensional Poverty Indicator (MPI) A person is considered MPI poor if she is deprived on at least one third of the weighted indicators: Health indicators Child mortality: Nutrition:

Education indicators Years of schooling: School attendance:

in the past five years has any child in the family died? (1/​6 weighting) is any person under 70 years of age in the household for whom there is nutritional information malnourished? (1/​6 weighting) has nobody aged ten years or older in the household completed six years of schooling? (1/​6 weighting) is any school-​aged child in the household not attending school up to the age s/​he would complete class 8? (1/​6 weighting)

Standard of Living indicators Electricity: does the household not have an electricity supply? (1/​18 weighting) Sanitation: does the household’s sanitation facility not meet the standard set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and/​or is it shared with other households? (1/​18 weighting) Drinking water: does the household not have access to drinking water meeting the standard set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals or safe drinking water in more than a 30-​minute roundtrip walk from home? (1/​18 weighting) Housing: does the household have inadequate housing, having a floor of natural materials or roof or wall of rudimentary materials? (1/​18 weighting)

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Cooking fuel: Asset ownership:

does the household cook with dung, agricultural crop, shrubs wood, charcoal or coal? (1/​18 weighting) does the household not own a motorcar or truck and more than one of the following items: a radio, television, refrigerator, telephone, bicycle or motorbike? (1/​18 weighting)

Source: (Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI), 2018)

However, the most widely used measurements of poverty rely on methods that purport to specify the level of income required by individuals or households to keep them out of poverty. The crudest of such measures was the $1 a day international poverty line adopted by the UN in 1990, which was used to quantify the numbers or proportions of people in the poorest countries in the world forced to live on less than the equivalent (at purchasing power parity) of US$ 1 per day. The current level of this indicator of ‘extreme poverty’ is set at US$ 1.90 per day. However, less arbitrary methods of measuring the poverty that exists in rich countries had been developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most important of these entailed a ‘budget standards approach’, which enlarged upon the Speenhamland method by establishing not merely the weekly quantity of bread required by a household of any given size, but the content and the cost of the full weekly shopping basket that might reasonably be required for the maintenance of ‘bare physical efficiency’ among household members (Rowntree, 1901). Subsequent variations on the budget standards approach have sought to include within the virtual shopping basket a range of ‘socially perceived necessities’ and levels of provision sufficient to enable people to participate in the life of the society of which they are a part (A. Davis et al, 2018; Mack & Lansley, 1985). A significant methodological development in the estimation of the scale and distribution of poverty has evolved from Townsend’s (1979) attempts to establish not an arbitrary ‘poverty line’, but a scientific ‘poverty threshold’: the point in the income distribution beneath which households will begin disproportionately to withdraw or be absented from participation in social life and prevailing living standards. Such thresholds have been variously –​and not necessarily satisfactorily –​ interpreted in terms of measuring the proportion of households living beneath some fixed proportion (often 50 per cent) of average income. Unacceptable material inequality Measuring poverty with reference to some point on the income distribution scale immediately calls into question whether the underlying issue fundamentally at stake is that of inequality, rather than poverty. Tawney (1913) suggested we might regard poverty as the unacceptable face of inequality. There are degrees of inequality in every society, and certain inequalities or differences are an inevitable

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consequence of human diversity. To an extent they may be in principle acceptable or in practice tolerable in any complex society. But there comes a point at which inequality is associated not merely with difference, but disadvantage, and becomes either morally unconscionable or socially unsustainable. Economic liberals would claim that inequality is functional and necessary to human society, since it fuels the motivation for self-​improvement upon which innovation and enterprise depend (K. Davis & Moore, 1945). But equally it may be contended that inequality can be dysfunctional and inimical to relational wellbeing (see discussion in Chapter 3). Social inequalities can have enervating or destructive effects; they may inflict ‘social suffering’ (Bourdieu, 1999). Important insights into the consequences of inequalities of needs satisfaction have been offered by the social epidemiologist, Richard Wilkinson (1996; 2005; and see Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Wilkinson’s initial thesis, simply put, was that health inequalities between countries relate not directly to variations in economic development, but to relative income equality and to the extent of social cohesion within a society. The inhabitants of rich countries undoubtedly experience greater life expectancy than those in poor countries but there is substantial evidence to show that among richer countries, those that are more equal generally have better life expectancy. Life expectancy is higher in Southern than Northern Europe; in Japan than the US. Overall mortality is lower in Sweden than in the UK. The reasons for this are complex. And within countries life expectancy, health and educational outcomes vary significantly between lower and higher socio-​economic groups (Dorling, 2010; Marmot, 2010). Wilkinson suggests that psycho-​social factors are at work and that inequalities of social status are inimical to good health. This will in part relate to unequal experiences during critical development phases in childhood. But it is likely also to relate to the effects of stress or depression resulting, on the one hand, from lack of self-​worth or diminished self-​esteem associated with inequalities of social status; or on the other, from the ontological insecurity associated with relative social isolation and the lack of belonging that people may experience in an unequal society. The global scale of material or economic inequality (Atkinson, 2015; D. Held & Kaya, 2007; Picketty, 2013) is as huge as its consequences may be subtle. And there is a bewildering spectrum of ways in which inequalities of income and asset holdings may be measured. For the purposes of illustration we shall here mention just two: the widely used Gini Index, which measures the deviation of the distribution between individuals or households within a population upon a scale which ranges from 0 (zero) representing absolute equality from 100, representing absolute inequality; and the Palma Ratio, which is the ratio between the share of income received by the richest 10 per cent of a population and the share received by the poorest 40 per cent. Each measure captures a different dimension of income inequality and both are illustrated among the data presented in Table 7.1 (see also Alvaredo et al, 2018).

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Table 7.1: Development, poverty and inequality in rich and poorer countries

US Norway Germany UK Japan Russia

Poverty

Income inequality1

Gender inequality3

Gross National Income Human Development (GNI) per capita Index (HDI) ranking (2017) (2016)

Population below 50% average income2

Gini index (2010–​2017)

Palma Ratio (2010–​2017)

WEF Global Gender Inequality Index (2018)

US$ 54,941 US$ 68,012 US$ 46,136 US$ 39,116 US$ 38,986 US$ 24,233

17.8% (2016) 8.2% (2016) 10.1% (2015) 11.1% (2016) 15.2% (2015) 14.6% (2011)

39 28 32 33 32 38

2.0 1.0 1.2 1.3 1.2 1.7

0.72 0.82 0.78 0.77 0.66 0.70

43 42 51 35 43 34

2.3 2.1 3.5 1.5 2.2 1.4

0.72 0.67 0.68 0.67 0.62 no data

12th 1st 4th 14th 19th 49th

Population in multidimensional poverty1 Mexico China Brazil India Nigeria Niger

US$ 16,944 US$ 15,270 US$ 1,3755 US$ 6,353 US$ 5,231 US$ 906

74th 86th 79th 130th 157th 188th

6.3% (2016) 4.1% (2014) 3.8% (2015) 27.5% (2016/​17) 52.0% (2016/​17) 90.6% (2012)

1. UNDP (2018) Human Development Indices and Indicators 2018 Statistical Update, New York. 2. OECD, Income Distribution database  –​ www.oecd.org/​social/​income-​distribution-​database.htm 3. World Economic Forum (2018) Global Gender Gap Report 2018, Geneva.

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Economic and human development1

Understanding Human Need

This table provides a snapshot of poverty and inequality data from a selection of six relatively rich countries and six relatively poorer countries. The countries are arranged in descending order based on the Gross National Income per capita of their respective populations, thus representing a measure of their relative economic development. But also included are the rankings of each country according to their score on the UN’s Human Development Index, a composite index which takes into account not only each country’s economic development, but also their social development, using measures of life expectancy and the extent of educational provision. The HDI reflects, in part at least, the effects of direct social provision of healthcare in meeting human need. Each set of data included here tells a different kind of story about just how countries may be relatively advantaged or disadvantaged in respect of their development and how their inhabitants may be relatively advantaged or disadvantaged in relation to each other. It may be seen that the associations between development, poverty and inequality are not simple or linear and have to be interpreted in a broad historical context that can’t be fully captured by this snapshot. A detailed commentary would require more space than is warranted in light of the primary purposes of this book. The table is presented in order to draw attention not only to complexity and variation, but also to the underlying reality that everywhere processes for the distribution of material resources for the satisfaction of human need generate degrees of relative disadvantage.

Exclusion and misrecognition: the construction and demarcation of social divisions Poverty and inequality may be considered in the context of a range of other issues that may not be as readily measurable, such as opportunities and outcomes. There are limits to what quantitative data can tell us about unmet needs and social disadvantage; about the processes by which human beings may be denied the satisfaction of their need for social inclusion, for mutual recognition and for engagement by and with other human beings; and about the social boundaries across which advantage and disadvantage are constructed. The concept of social exclusion, though sometimes used as a synonym for poverty, focuses on relational rather than distributive processes of disadvantage (Room, 1995). It has proved in practice to be an elusive or protean concept variously associated with neo-​liberal preoccupations with labour market participation; with social democratic preoccupations with the failures of existing redistributive policies; with neo-​conservative preoccupations with the posited existence of a ‘moral underclass’ (Levitas, 1998). Nevertheless the attention given to exclusionary processes has been important (Hills et al, 2002; Rodgers et al, 1995), not least for the debates it has opened up regarding non-​material human needs.

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In Chapter 5 we touched briefly on cultural and symbolic meanings through which human needs may be constituted and how, for example, shame may attach to a person’s inability to conform to socially constructed conventions. Ruth Lister (2004) has drawn attention to the distinction between the hardships that constitute the ‘material core’ of poverty and the ‘relational-​symbolic aspects’ of poverty: the stigma, the humiliation, the powerlessness. If poverty was once regarded as a feature of life’s natural order, since the Reformation in Europe at least, poverty has for public policy purposes been problematised and at times regarded not necessarily as a systemic failure in the distribution of wealth, but often or in part as a result of the shortcomings of those individuals who do not achieve self-​sufficiency or who fail to adhere to culturally prescribed standards of decency. ‘The poor’ may be cast as the ‘other’, as beings beyond the bounds of ordinary citizenship (J. Scott, 1994), or –​at worst –​as objects for ‘wholesome horror’ (Edwin Chadwick, cited by Spicker, 1984). Symbolically drawn boundaries may be crystallised within and shape the meaning of the social boundaries that divide human societies at a variety of levels (for example, Lamont & Molnar, 2002). The earliest civilisations imposed formal meaning upon evolving boundaries between ‘free men’ on the one hand and women, slaves and barbarians on the other: boundaries that are different from, but in many ways more deeply significant than, physical territorial or administrative boundaries or borders. It has been contended that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’ (Marx & Engels, 1848: 16), and we shall touch in the next section of this chapter upon the ways class boundaries may serve as axes of exploitation and oppression. But social divisions of class are fuelled, sustained and managed not only through the exercise of naked economic power. There are intimate connections between socio-​economic and socio-​cultural differences (Weber, 1914), and it may be argued that the imposition of the tastes and cultural practices of dominant socio-​economic classes and the casual denigration of the supposedly vulgar lifestyles of subaltern classes may be regarded as a form of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1972). The term ‘symbolic violence’ is highly emotive, but it captures something about the extent to which social indifference or ‘misrecognition’ can reach as powerfully as substantive hostility across the symbolic boundaries that separate advantaged and disadvantaged groups. In Chapter 2 we briefly considered the concept of recognition and the idea that disparity of recognition affects disparities of needs satisfaction. The concept of recognition and the ‘struggle for recognition’ dates back to Hegel (1821). His philosophy departed from the individualism of the Romantic philosophers by emphasising the intersubjectivity of human existence. We are defined by and through the recognition accorded or denied to us by other human beings. We can none of us ‘resign from society’ (Gaarder, 1996: 307). Recent authors have drawn on Hegel’s notion of recognition to argue, for example, that colonial

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subjects and oppressed indigenous minorities are victims of ‘misrecognition’ (Fanon, 1967; C. Taylor, 1992). If we are to draw the concepts of recognition and misrecognition into a discussion of human need we must nonetheless remind ourselves that human beings are defined in part by their biology. We are embodied creatures with bodily needs (K. Ellis & Dean, 2000). But while human beings share essential biological features we also differ from one another biologically. This arises in part as we age. If we survive the varying degrees of physical risk to be encountered during our life-​course, we experience a protracted developmental stage in our early years and a period characterised by varying degrees of degeneration in later years. We differ from one another genetically: in terms of sex and sexuality; phenotypical characteristics; physical and cognitive propensities or impairments. But we are only partly defined by our biology, because for human beings biological differences take on social meanings. We are recognisable according to the meanings that attach to difference. A simplified illustrative overview of the various intersecting ways in which this occurs is provided in Box 7.3.

Box 7.3: Social constructions of difference

•

•

•

•

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Because women have babies and men do not, women and men have tended to assume different social roles, with differing significance and degrees of power within society. The biological differences between men and women are subsumed by socially constructed conceptions of gender. Because sexual relationships are associated not simply with biological reproduction but the (re)generation of human ties and social relationships the differing sexual drives or orientations to which human beings are subject are subsumed by socially constructed conceptions of sexuality. Though phenotypical differences (for example skin colour) may have resulted from incidental or minor adaptive biological variations between different social groups of human beings in different parts of the world, they have assumed social meaning and significance in the course of human history through processes of migration and settlement, invasion and conquest, subjugation and slavery. It was once (and by some still is) mistakenly believed that phenotypical differences between humans signify that they belong to different ‘races’ and that some races are superior to others. Insofar as such beliefs are translated into discriminatory and oppressive practices, they can result in racialised difference. The genetic characteristics that human beings share with their immediate forbearers may differentiate them from other members of the human species, but such characteristics will invariably be accompanied and given context by social

Unmet needs and social disadvantage

•

•

characteristics; by distinctive cultural, linguistic and, possibly, religious differences that together go to make up a person’s ethnicity. Some people are born with genetic impairments. Others in the course of their lives experience illness, injury or degenerative conditions that impair their functioning. Impairment may be physical in nature or it may be associated with mental health problems or learning difficulties. The lives of some people are impaired by pain, physical discomfort and mental distress. However, while biological factors induce functional impairment, what constitutes impairment is also defined with reference to socially accepted or imposed standards of normality. People who cannot walk, see or hear or who have difficulty learning or relating to others are impaired as much as anything else by the norms of society around them. Biological effects are subsumed by socially constructed notions of disability. The human life-​course entails growing up and, in time, growing old. However, while chronological ageing is a biological process, the meanings that attach to its various stages are shaped by social processes. ‘Childhood’ and ‘youth’ are not biologically defined. They are defined by social customs and practices, policy priorities and legal criteria. The notion of ‘retirement’ is a wholly modern policy construction, and our understanding of what constitutes ‘old age’ is utterly dependent on social and cultural context. The biological basis of the relative vulnerability, strength and frailty that we can expect to experience in the course of a human life-​span is overlaid with socially constructed (and often self-​fulfilling) expectations and culturally specific assumptions concerning, for example, the relative immaturity, wisdom and senility of various age groups in society. Chronological ageing is subsumed by social ageing.

It may be argued that human beings have an overriding need to be recognised by other human beings in order to have their needs appropriately met. It may be seen, however, that women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, members of racialised and/​or minority ethnic groups, disabled people, young people and old people can under certain circumstances or for certain purposes be misrecognised through their ‘otherness’ (Lister, 2004). In an important sense, therefore, as human beings with universal as well as particular human needs they are misrecognised. Given that we all of us experience shifting and overlapping social identities in the course of our lives, we are all vulnerable at some point to misrecognition. People can be denied the mutual recognition upon which personal identity and social caring depend. People can be denied recognition in the public realm, so that they can’t effectively name and claim their needs (N. Fraser, 1997: Ch. 1), resulting in systemic subordination or oppression and a spectrum of inequalities affecting different social groups in a variety of different ways (Platt, 2019). The one social division that affects all human societies is that of gender, and it is a division reflected in enduring inequality between women and men as illustrated by the addition to

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Table 7.1 of a column showing the WEF Global Gender Inequality Gap Index scores for the countries listed. The index is a composite indicator based on four sub-​indexes, measuring Economic Participation and Opportunity; Educational Attainment; Health and Survival; and Political Empowerment. The highest possible score is 1, which if achieved, would signify complete gender parity; the lowest possible score is 0, which if achieved, would signify total gender imparity. No country achieves complete parity. The symbolic boundaries that mark the social divisions that define our lives can intersect in complex ways, sometimes compounding, sometimes counteracting processes of advantage and disadvantage. David Taylor (1998) has drawn a distinction between ‘categorical’ and ‘ontological’ identities. We all of us have multiple intersecting categorical identities based on specific biological and biographical factors –​our sex, age, phenotypical characteristics, impairments and so on, on the one hand; our socio-​economic, ethnic, religious background and life-​course experiences on the other –​which affect our particular needs. But we also have an ontological identity –​our sense of self and the integrity of our being –​which literally effects (that is, defines) our universal needs for security, care and belonging. Ontological needs are shared by all human beings, but they are differently inflected and experienced in a diversity of ways depending on just how one’s categorical identities intersect in the course of one’s life. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ has been valorised as a component within ‘Third Wave Feminism’ (Evans, 2015); explored, for example, in relation to the ‘matrix of domination’ constituted by race, class and gender (Collins, 2014); but also implicitly illustrated, for example in historical accounts of the intersection of class and disability (Slorach, 2016). Nevertheless, it is to the maintenance of fundamental ontological identity or ‘humanness’ to which we now return and to processes by which people may be de-​humanised.

Dehumanisation: processes of alienation, oppression and exploitation We have already touched (in Chapters 2 and 4) on a radical humanist perspective, derived from Marx, which holds that human needs are constituted through the essence of our human species being: what humans need is that which defines their humanity. It follows that whatever diminishes the fulfilment of human needs diminishes humanity: it is dehumanising. The term ‘dehumanisation’ has been variously used in ways that encompass at least some elements of this meaning. Marx himself used the term ‘alienation’ to refer –​as Durkheim (1893) would do  –​to the process by which under capitalist relations of production human beings are alienated from the product and the very performance of their own labour. But he also used the term not just sociologically, but in a philosophical sense when speaking of the ways in which human beings can be alienated from

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their very humanity by processes occurring within human society. Used in this sense alienation is very much a form of dehumanisation. In psychology (for example, Haslam, 2006) distinctions have been drawn between animalistic and mechanistic forms of dehumanisation; contrasting processes by which some humans are conceptualised by others and treated more like animals or machines than humans. Instances of animalistic dehumanisation –​ which may be better understood as dyshumanisation (D. Smith, 2011) –​ include the ways in which women, slaves, colonised natives, nomads, or outsiders of all kinds may be considered as less than fully human or to some greater or lesser extent bestial. The process is manifest in racist ideologies and, in their most extreme form, genocide. Instances of mechanistic dehumanisation include the ways in which human beings may treat others as no more than a means to an end; as functional entities devoid of feelings or agency. The concept can clearly be applied in various contexts: most obviously to the process of alienation that Durkheim, Marx and others would identify with various labour market processes that reduce a person metaphorically to a mere cog in a machine; but also to the ways in which social institutions (firms, factories, prisons, hospitals, schools or even families) can shape and de-​personalise people (Foucault, 1977; Goffman, 1968). An important, if complex, attempt to link the concept of dehumanisation to theories of human need has been made by Michael Dover (2019). Dover’s argument is that dehumanisation –​along with ‘oppression’ and ‘exploitation’ –​can lead to systematic inequality of opportunity to access needs satisfiers, leading in turn to suboptimal levels of health, autonomy, agency, competence and relatedness and thereby serious harm; which, he asserts, constitutes ‘human injustice’. The argument seeks first to demonstrate the compatibility between Doyal and Gough’s Theory of Human Need (1991) with those defined by Ryan and Deci’s Self-​ Determination Theory (2017) (both of which have been discussed in Chapter 4). But Dover then proceeds to articulate the needs objectively defined by these approaches with an array of abstract concepts. To concepts of justice and injustice we must necessarily return (in Chapter 8), but we should perhaps for now substitute for the term ‘human injustice’ the pragmatically framed and morally neutral term in use throughout this chapter, namely ‘social disadvantage’. And from the radical humanist perspective upon which this book is seeking to enlarge, we might regard ‘oppression’ and ‘exploitation’ as processes that are enmeshed with, if not encompassed within, an overarching understanding of dehumanisation. Oppression is a process visited by dominant social groups upon ‘other’, subordinate groups. It is a process that goes beyond passive misrecognition and exclusion, since it systematically enforces socially constructed boundaries between groups; it subordinates; it obstructs; it harms; it disadvantages the other. Insofar as oppression inhibits human fulfilment, it dehumanises. Exploitation is a process by which human beings extract material advantage from other human beings in processes of competitive exchange. It can be understood as a form of mechanistic

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dehumanisation and, as already indicated, is or may be implicated when human labour power is commodified. Table 7.2: Social disadvantage as the denial of human fulfilment Aristotle’s idealised requirements for Marx’s critique of capitalism’s tendency to human fulfilment or eudaimonic well-being negate universal human fulfilment • The maximum and unimpeded realisation of human capabilities. Human beings are removed from mere animal existence by their ability through their activity consciously to shape and control the world around them.

• Capitalism impaired the realisation of human capabilities. Human beings who were dependent for their survival on the performance of wage labour were removed barely if at all from mere animal existence, having little or no opportunity consciously to shape and control the world around them and being alienated from the fruits of their own labour.

• The exercise of intelligence. Such capabilities • Though industrial capitalism harnessed the require intelligence, a distinctive capacity for latest scientific knowledge, for the majority of thinking that must be progressively developed workers it restricted the exercise of intelligence and applied. or creativity, condemning them to routinised, mindless activity. • The exercise of deliberation and choice. Effective thinking requires, in turn, the capacity for reason and the freedom thereby to shape one’s own life through deliberation and choice. The idea of self-​ determined rational activity was captured in the Aristotelian concept of ‘praxis’ and in his acknowledgement that the human being is a ‘political animal’, whose existence is predicated on social intercourse.

• The lives of workers and their families under capitalism were governed by alien forces that restricted the exercise of deliberation and choice and curtailed their freedom to shape their own future. The scope for self-​determined rational activity was systematically constrained.

• The expression of good character. In choosing • The narrowing of life’s compass to the sale how to behave or to act a person must choose of labour power as a means to obtain life’s what she judges for herself to be right. Virtue necessities and the subjection of the wage stems not from obedience to rules that are labourer to the discipline of the factory imposed, but from the good that is chosen and to regulation by the capitalist state for its own sake; from a balancing of personal undermined the expression of good character. pleasure and civic duty in a manner that Such conditions attenuated the opportunity achieves a harmonious ‘Golden mean’. to behave or to act as one might judge for oneself to be right. • The enjoyment of friendship. Friendship, or philia, in this sense extends to the love, care and companionship experienced between intimates, family members, neighbours and fellow-​citizens and is an essential and constitutive feature of human society.

• The capacity of free-​market capitalism to generate social relationships between things and material relationships between persons, threatened the enjoyment of friendship. Commodification and competition were inimical to social connectedness and mutual caring.

Source: adapted from H. Dean, 2016b and see R. Miller, 1992

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We may return for a moment to Aristotle, for whom to be fully human a person needs more than is required for bare survival or to achieve a reasonable degree of physical comfort; she needs to flourish and to achieve fulfilment through social engagement. We have seen that Marx’s conceptualisation of human need and of the essence of human species being reflected elements of Aristotelian thinking. This is further illustrated in the way Marx brings his theory of need to bear on the ways in which industrial capitalism systematically disadvantaged the working population as a class (see the interpretation presented in Table 7.2). In short, for Marx, capitalism itself was potentially dehumanising, though history demonstrates that equally, state communism could be dehumanising (for example, Piper, 2003). It remains the case, however, that in a Global, ‘post-​ Westphalian’ era, the world’s economic system is fundamentally capitalist (for example, D. Held & McGrew, 2007). But the significance of the radical humanism that may be derived from Marx’s theory of human need is that it potentially goes beyond a specific preoccupation with capitalism and the commodification of labour power to consider the essence of our humanity and that which impairs or violates it. In a very similar way, Mari Mikkola seeks to go beyond a specific preoccupation with gender and immediate manifestations of patriarchy in order to develop a ‘humanist feminism’ that embraces a ‘genuinely inclusive, ethically thick conception of humanity’ (Mikkola, 2016: 9). Mikkola’s humanist feminism would seem to be broadly coterminous with the radical humanist perspective explored throughout this book. In earlier chapters I have critically discussed the way in which appeals to human ‘dignity’ tend characteristically to be premised on an understanding of the human being as an autonomous rather than an interdependent individual (Chapter 3) and how the construct of the autonomous individual has shaped dominant theories of human need (Chapter 4). Mikkola’s case for humanist feminism draws upon similar premises and applies terms used by Antony (2000) –​‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ –​to apply respectively: on the one hand, to approaches that regard certain norms and values as being ‘internal’ to, or constitutive of, the human individual; and on the other, to approaches that have regard more inclusively to the external ‘universals’ by which humanity as a whole may be defined. Mikkola does not explicitly draw a link to the universal species characteristics suggested by Marx’s concept of human species being, though Antony, in the process of rejecting Martha Nussbaum’s interpretation (see Chapter  4 and Box 4.4), alludes explicitly to Aristotle’s externalist method, which … simply involves learning what human beings can do that nothing else can do. We do not need to know anything about what any human being values in order to discover the essence of a human

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life. A reasonable extension of this method to human beings as we understand them today might even yield an account of either the scientific nature of an individual human being or the definitional nature of humankind. (Anthony, 2000: 27–​8) This would seem, certainly, to chime with Marx’s interpretation. What Mikkola proceeds to do is to define dehumanisation as a process; a process of acts and treatments that are ‘disadvantaging and damaging’ (2016:  10) to persons as human beings. Such an interpretation can be used to single out treatment that is specifically or especially disadvantageous to women, but it may similarly be applied to the analysis of the treatment of other subordinated or oppressed social groups; to the consequences of not only capitalism and patriarchy, but colonialism, the medicalisation of disability and a range of other systemic projects. Mikkola goes further in seeking to draw a distinction between the harms and the wrong that are occasioned by ‘social injustice’.1 The distinction applies between the disadvantage occasioned by patriarchy to women as women and that occasioned to women as humans; between gendered practices of subordination, oppression or exploitation and what we might think of as ‘alienating’ practices that undermine or compromise women’s essential humanity. The distinction by implication corresponds to the distinction made in Chapter 3 between the thin and the thick of human needing and, by extension, between –​on the one hand, a hedonic understanding of the benefits and harms resulting from specific processes of advantage and disadvantage; and on the other, a eudaimonic understanding of that which nurtures humanity as opposed to the wrong of dehumanisation, the fulfilment as opposed to the neglect of essential human need.

Conclusion/​Summary This chapter has focused on the dynamics of social advantage and disadvantage associated with the ways in which human needs may be met or go unmet. From a social policy perspective, explanations of disadvantage must have regard to the processes by which advantages accrue to some and are denied to others. The chapter groups such processes under three headings, though it is important to note that the processes described are interconnected: • Firstly, the chapter has considered the distribution of material resources. The key concepts it addresses are those of poverty and inequality. Poverty is concerned with the absence of resources and the associated consequences, but may be differently conceived and measured depending on judgements that are made as to what and how much people need. Inequality is concerned with the distribution of resources for the meeting of needs, but may be differently viewed having regard not only to normative judgements as to ‘fairness’,

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but evidence as to the dysfunctional effects of socio-​economic inequality. Inequalities exist not only within countries, but between them, reflecting unevenness of human development. • Secondly, the chapter has considered the construction and demarcation of social divisions in society. The key concepts it addresses are those of exclusion and misrecognition. Social exclusion is a concept that can capture the processes by which the human need for belonging and participation may be compromised. Such processes may be driven by cultural and symbolic meanings closely associated with material poverty. But culturally or socially constructed meanings also create boundaries throughout human society, based on human differences and constructed identities; divisions around class, gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, disability; potential barriers to recognition of distinctive social identities and essential human needs. • Thirdly, the chapter has considered related process of alienation, oppression and exploitation. The key concept it addresses is that of dehumanisation. Dehumanisation is a term that may refer to the ways in which some members of humanity treat other members as less than fully human, so justifying oppression, exploitation or even genocide. But it may also refer to the harm that may be done to human beings when their needs as human beings are not met: the denial of opportunities to access the means of livelihood, healthcare and educational provision can amount to dehumanisation. Marx argued that capitalism is inherently alienating, not only because of the manner in which it exploits labour power, but in the sense that it alienates people from the essence of their humanity. Similarly there are feminists who would argue that patriarchy as a form of systemic of oppression is not merely harmful, it is dehumanising. Dehumanisation is a concept that can capture not only the disadvantage resulting from failures to meet ‘thinner’ needs, but failures to meet the ‘thickest’, definitive human needs.

Challenging questions 1 . At what point do material inequalities become socially disadvantageous? 2. In what circumstances and in what sense does social disadvantage become dehumanising?

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8 Articulating needs as rights

This chapter will:

• • •

present a discussion of rights-​based approaches to human need; critique the established conception of social citizenship as a basis for the right to state welfare and advance an alternative conception of social rights as articulations of human need; offer a critical discussion of the connection between social rights and concepts of social justice and of the relationship between justice and humanity.

Human needs acquire particular meaning when they are expressed in terms of human rights. The idea that needs may be translated into rights has been dismissed by some as ‘a dangerous modern heresy’ (E. Powell, 1972: 12). If so, it is a heresy that may be traced back to Thomas Paine’s (1791) treatise on The Rights of Man, in which he proposed the abolition of England’s Poor Laws and sketched out a scheme that would give the poor a right to relief. The idea that our essential needs may give rise to fundamental rights came of age with the advent of 20th-​ century social liberalism, perhaps most decisively, with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1944) assertion that ‘freedom from want’ amounts to a human right. Human rights have been characterised not as a modern heresy, but as ‘values for a Godless age’ (Klug, 2000). We have discussed in previous chapters a distinction that may be drawn between top-​down theoretical and bottom-​up practical approaches to needs. Correspondingly, there are two ways in which needs may be translated into, or articulated as, rights. Top-​down approaches translate needs as ‘doctrinal’ rights, and bottom-​up approaches translate needs as ‘claims-​based’ rights (H. Dean, 2015). By doctrinal rights we may refer to rights that are handed down, as it were, from above: rights conferred on us by nature or by God; birth rights preserved by our forebears; moral rights revealed by sages, priests or philosophers; legal rights conferred by law-​makers. By claims-​based rights we may refer to rights that are asserted from below: man-​made rights defined by agreement or through struggle; rights framed through demands, in manifestos or by petition. As with theoretical and practical conceptions of need, doctrinal and claims-​based rights are difficult to disentangle because in the course of time each will inform the

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other. Charters, declarations and conventions of rights may enshrine doctrines established through past struggles. When, as human beings, we name our needs there is a sense in which we implicitly claim a right to the means to satisfy those needs. However, there is a difference between needs that have been named for us by others and needs that we name for ourselves. The relationship between the two becomes clearer when we consider rights-​based approaches to human need.

Rights-​based approaches This short exploration of rights-​based approaches will consider where ideas about rights come from before articulating the taxonomy of prevailing approaches to needs that was presented in Chapter 7 with a discussion of different kinds of rights-​based approaches to human need. The origins of rights The modern conception of rights dates from the period of the so-​called Western ‘Enlightenment’ of the 17th and 18th centuries. As we saw in Chapter  2, Enlightenment thought drew in part upon old ideas from classical philosophers, but what was new about it was the break it made from a feudal era in which rights, insofar as they existed at all, were little more than arbitrary privileges. Kings and Queens ruled by divine right and could bestow privileges upon their Nobles. England’s Magna Carta of 1215 is sometimes acclaimed for having laid the foundations of our human rights, though in practice it amounted to little more than a reluctant concession by the Crown of certain restricted liberties made, in effect, exclusively to the Nobility. The common people had no rights other than a right to be guided or ruled by their superiors. And the English Bill of Rights (1689), while portending constitutional safeguards, largely served the interests of the landed gentry, making little difference in practice for ordinary people. However, the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution (1776 and 1787, respectively) and the French Declaration of Rights (1789), though different in some respects, helped crystallise a radically new conception of the human individual as a bearer of rights. Rights were not uniformly conceived. Throughout this book we have explored a distinction between thin and thick conceptions of well-being. In ideological terms, we might think of thin conceptions as essentially liberal; thick conceptions as essentially republican (although these essential terms are not to be confused with the labels that may be perversely adopted by political parties or the conflated terminologies of everyday political discourse). The distinction reflects different constructions of the human individual and, by implication, of the rights she might bear: the abstract proprietor on the one hand; the vulnerable subject on the other.

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Hegel’s contribution to Enlightenment thinking appears to have encompassed both, in the sense that it recognised individual possession –​the freedom of property ownership –​as the embodiment of an individual right, while also advocating poor relief, public healthcare and education as a means to ensure public or social order (see Fine, 1984: 57–​9). The tension between these very different kinds of rights is reflected in distinctions between formal and substantive rights and in a variety of related or overlapping theoretical distinctions, such as those outlined in Table 8.1. It is a distinction that is swept aside by those who see something heretical in a rights-​based approach to human need. Most famously, the idea that there could be some moral basis to rights was dismissed as ‘nonsense on stilts’ by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1789), whose approach to human need we discussed in Chapter  3. For Bentham the only rights that mattered were ‘black-​letter’ rights: rights that had been legally established and written down. This utilitarian and characteristically legalistic conception prioritises governance above rights (Osborne, 1996). The ascendancy of this narrow focus played some part, perhaps, in occluding debate about the connections between rights and needs until the emergence in the mid-​20th century of the modern human rights agenda. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 consolidated what have been characterised as ‘first wave’ human rights (for example, Klug, 2000); those liberally conceived civil and political rights that had been named and claimed since the Enlightenment. But it also named and claimed a ‘second wave’ of human rights, rights to economic, social and cultural security: which are for most purposes Table 8.1: Thin/​formal versus thick/​substantive conceptions of rights Thin/​formal conceptions

Thick/​substantive conceptions

negative rights [rights to forbearance of others]

vs

positive rights [rights that allow one to be oneself]

see Berlin, I. (1967) ‘Two concepts of liberty’, in A. Quinton (ed.) Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press

freedom rights [liberties and immunities]

vs

entitlement rights [claims and powers]

see Hohfeld, W. (1946) Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, Yale University Press

choice rights vs [the right to exercise free will]

benefit rights [the right to pursue one’s own interests]

see Campbell, T. (1988) Justice, Macmillan. Chapter 2

background rights vs [abstract –​based on underlying principles]

institutional rights [concrete –​based on policy or goals]

s ee Dworkin, R. (1977) Taking Rights Seriously, Duckworth

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captured by the overarching term ‘social rights’. At the level of grand rhetoric at least, human rights were explicitly connected to human needs. Bryan Turner has argued that ‘it is from a collectively held recognition of individual frailty that rights as a system of mutual protection gain their emotive force’ (1993: 507). The human rights framework offered not only individual property rights, but also rights to security within a social order. It recognised the individual not only as a potentially autonomous being, but as a necessarily vulnerable being. Ostensibly, the new idea of human rights bowed both to a liberal and a republican conception of rights, but less consciously, it also gave expression to a deeper philosophical anthropology. According to Turner, human rights provide a substitute for the human species’ lack of natural instincts (2006: 29). While other sentient creatures’ responses to their needs are more or less instinctive, this is not so for human beings. This is not simply because of the human capacity for rational calculation. The suffering –​physical and emotional –​that must to some degree attend the vicissitudes of a human life-​course is not only inevitable, it is also foreseeable. Human individuals are able to recognise their own frailty and the frailty of others and to construct social institutions for their mutual protection. But such institutions are in themselves fragile and require a socially constructed underpinning of rights. Later in this chapter, it will be argued that long before any discourse of rights emerged, human beings as social creatures had engaged through mutually negotiated habits and customs in the construction of social conventions by which they recognised each other’s needs; conventions that we might in retrospect acknowledge as being founded –​prototypically perhaps –​in a form of human rights. This deeper or ‘thicker’ meaning  –​though often obscured  –​is especially pertinent to any reading of what came in the modern era to be termed ‘second generation’ human rights. In practice, however, second generation rights have remained more elusive than first generation rights. The form in which they were written into the UDHR owed much to the Cold War tensions of that era (for example, Hunt, 1996). They represented an uncomfortable compromise between first, a new found, if guarded, willingness on the part of Western liberals to accommodate a mixed economy and permit a limited role for the state in the provision of social welfare; second, the desire of developing countries to ensure that economic growth should be accompanied by rising social standards; and third, by the Soviet communist bloc to inflect the agenda away from liberally inspired civil and political freedoms in favour of its own interpretation of human rights, based on wholly state-​organised economic and social guarantees (Davy, 2013; Wronka, 1992). Despite rhetorical assertions as to the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights, these tensions as to their substance –​and, more particularly, as to the manner of their implementation and enforcement –​led to the development of separate international covenants; one for civil and political rights, the other for economic, social and cultural rights. The latter have been

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consistently marginalised in favour of the former (H. Dean, 2015). Later, with the collapse of Soviet communism, human rights rhetoric became –​for a time at least –​less of a propaganda medium (UNDP, 2003). This may to an extent have opened the door to the possibility of global approaches to social policy issues (B. Deacon et al, 1997) and to rights-​based approaches to problems such as global poverty (Pogge, 2007). In the meantime, in response to the demands of the global South, the UN through the Declaration of the Right to Development of 1986 had purported to institute a ‘third generation’ of human rights. The Declaration, though it is not binding, was intended in the words of the Senegalese delegate to express for the poorest people of the world ‘the right to live better’. It sought to establish the principle that all human beings should be enabled to participate in processes of social, economic and political development (Rosas, 2001). This latest generation of rights gave expression to shared human needs, incorporating demands for peace, for a healthy environment and for self-​determination. Rights-​based rhetoric conceals a multitude of different meanings. However this multitude of meanings rests upon what Ignatieff has called ‘the shared vocabulary from which our arguments can begin, and the bare minimum from which different areas of flourishing can take root’ (2001: 95). Let us see where that vocabulary leads. A taxonomy of rights-​based approaches Having considered in Chapter  6 taxonomies of needs-​based approaches and their corresponding welfare regimes, we may construct a parallel taxonomy of Figure 8.1: A taxonomy of currently prevailing rights-​based approaches to human need DOCTRINAL RIGHTS liberal democratic personal rights

social democratic citizenship rights exercised by (potentially) VULNERABLE SUBJECTS

exercised by (supposedly) AUTONOMOUS SUBJECTS asocial conservative conditional rights

social conservative protective rights

CLAIMS-BASED RIGHTS

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currently prevailing rights-​based approaches to human need. Such a taxonomy is represented by the diagram in Figure 8.1. In the diagram, the vertical axes from Chapter 6 are now replaced by an axis representing a dimension with doctrinally conceived rights at one end of the continuum and claims-​based rights at the other. The horizontal axes from Figures 6.1 and 6.2 are replaced by an axis representing a dimension with the thinly conceived autonomous individual subject as the bearer of rights at one end of the continuum and the thickly conceived vulnerable interdependent subject as the bearer of rights at the other. The model offers us four contested and (potentially) mutually contradictory ways of talking about social rights. • Personal rights. An ideal liberal welfare regime prioritises the particular needs that reflect the requirements for autonomous enterprise in a harmoniously functioning market economy. The right to have such needs met is doctrinally conceived in the sense that the efficacy of markets is believed to depend upon the application of formal principles, including the principle that there should be equal opportunity for everybody to participate and to do so on equal terms. Such a right, however, is personal: it arises selectively where a particular need or deficit can be demonstrated to exist and where particular benefit will result from meeting that need. A right to targeted assistance can be said to arise if a person can show that –​through unemployment or infirmity –​she lacks the means of subsistence and therefore the ability productively to participate. If markets should prove incapable of developing the skills and maintaining the health of the labour force, then a right to education and healthcare will arise. The administration of such rights requires efficient public services. Entitlement is premised on a civic duty ideal: the assumption that autonomous individuals may be expected and should be encouraged to strive for productive participation and maximum self-​sufficiency. The bearer of social rights may be constituted as the conscientious consumer of public services. • Conditional rights. An ideal asocial conservative welfare regime prioritises the circumstantial needs that reflect requirements for survival in a hazardous and competitive social environment. To the extent that anyone can make a claim against another to have such needs met, such a claim amounts at best to an ambiguous right, because it is necessarily conditional. Autonomous individuals may bargain with each other for the means to satisfy need and such bargaining may give rise to everyday expectations  –​to which the term ‘rights’ may informally attach. Such rights are no more than the conditions upon which bilateral exchanges are conducted. The concept of rights may, however, be transposed to a wider multilateral context. If a person is unable to satisfy her needs independently, she might possibly assert a claim against the community or society at large to the satisfaction of such need, upon condition that she deserves it. The administration of such rights requires the exercise of authority

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and judgement. Entitlement is conditional on obedience. The bearer of social rights is constituted as a supplicant. • Protective rights. An ideal social conservative welfare regime prioritises the common needs that reflect requirements for conformity and stability in a hierarchically ordered society. The right to have such needs met is claimed on the basis that one belongs to and accepts one’s place in that society. Such rights arise because the common denominator shared by all members of society is a degree of present or potential vulnerability. Conceding rights to people may bind them together and so serve to protect them from subversive influences; to protect traditional institutions and practices upon which social order depends; to protect against such risks as the people share in common. Entitlement is a matter of mutual moral obligation. The bearer of social rights is constituted as a member of a bounded society. • Citizenship rights. An ideal social democratic welfare regime prioritises the universal needs that reflect requirements for human fulfilment. The right to have such needs met is a conception borne of reformist doctrine (whether social liberal or more radically social democratic). Such rights arise through the creation of an effectively structured form of citizenship. They are axiomatically comprehensive in nature and unconditional in principle, though they may attach to citizens in response to different contingencies during different parts of the human life-​course. Entitlement is premised on an ideal of collective responsibility. The bearer of social rights is constituted as a citizen. In practice, social policy makers and many commentators speak about social or welfare rights quite loosely and can and do  –​ whether unwittingly or intentionally –​muddle different ideals together and they will, of course, adopt different terminologies. For example, the term ‘citizenship rights’ may be applied in general use in welfare regimes without any social democratic pretensions. Actually existing welfare regimes are invariably suboptimal compromises premised on competing ideals. Once again, the purpose of the model presented here is primarily heuristic. It helps us to understand the often confused and contradictory ideals that inform the ways in which social rights have emerged and the competing discourses through which they are constituted in relation to human need. With this in mind, we shall turn to the concept of social or welfare citizenship, since it is through the practical negotiation of social citizenship that rights to needs satisfaction can in practice emerge.

Reconceptualising social citizenship Though we started this chapter with a discussion of human rights, it should be borne in mind that conceptions of human rights are of relatively recent provenance. The invention of citizenship rights predated the invention of human

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rights by over two millennia, and it is citizenship rights that have provided the basic model on which human rights are founded (P. Clarke, 1996). Citizenship is both an ancient ideal and a current practice (Dwyer, 2010; Lister, 2003). It is a perennially disputed concept (J. Clarke et al, 2014). And yet it is through citizenship of a nation state that human rights are most often realised in practice. Though citizenship in capitalist welfare states accommodates a ‘social’ dimension, this is applied in different ways. Though people may be citizens in a legal sense, their needs may be construed within different capitalist welfare state regimes not necessarily as universal needs, but as particular, circumstantial, or common needs. The economic, social and cultural rights defined by the UDHR and subsequent international instruments encompass rights to freely chosen work, an adequate standard of living, social security, housing, healthcare, education, participation in cultural life and to share in the benefits of scientific progress (Eide, 2001). The categories ‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ in practice overlap, and as has been indicated it is common to roll these distinctions together under the umbrella of the term ‘social rights’ (for example, T. H. Marshall, 1950) or ‘welfare rights’. The latter term acknowledges that, although clearly such rights have not necessarily achieved universal status, they have been partly or even substantially addressed through the development of various capitalist welfare state regimes. It can be argued that the universalist social citizenship ideal has yet to be fully achieved –​ even in the most highly developed welfare regimes –​and for the purposes of our discussion of human need a distinction can be drawn between welfare citizenship (the practice) and social citizenship (the ideal). The Marshallian compromise The ‘social’ citizenship concept propounded by T. H. Marshall (1950; 1985) is but a component of the welfare citizenship settlement. It was part of a compromise. Nonetheless the concept he elaborated is important, not least because it has been so influential. Marshall argued that three kinds of rights –​civil/​legal rights, political/​democratic rights and social/​welfare rights  –​could be compared to the legs of a three-​legged stool. Just as a three-​legged stool will be unstable if one of its legs is missing, weak or broken, so a society will be unstable if any of these three elements of citizenship should remain undeveloped or inadequate or if it should be undermined. Marshall advocated what he called the ‘hyphenated society’  –​ democratic-​welfare-​capitalism (1985:  123). The hyphenated society depended upon an essential equilibrium between political, social and civil rights. Marshall supposed that the state and the market existed as essentially opposing forces, but that democratic-​welfare-​capitalism achieved an optimum balance between accountability, fairness and freedom (Hindess, 1987). Political rights were necessary for democratic legitimacy; social rights to ensure some measure of social justice; civil rights to provide the conditions necessary for a market

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economy. For Marshall, the development of citizenship, which had begun with the Athenian city state in the fourth or fifth century bce, had come of age with the development of the 20th-​century welfare state. Citizenship was no longer about self-​government by a small and exclusive city elite, but about the dynamic regulation of a large and fully enfranchised industrialised nation that had to address the needs of its inhabitants. Marshall was right that industrialised nations had, self-​evidently, been obliged to address not only the needs of their individual citizens for some degree of formal autonomy (as economic actors and democratic subjects), but also their substantive welfare needs. His concept of social rights has been criticised, however, from several quarters. It is possible to group these criticisms according to the four different approaches to human need that have already been outlined. First, liberal/​economistic approaches are inclined to the promotion of social standards, rather than social rights (Mishra, 1999). This is an approach for which individual autonomy and personal fulfilment is thought to flow from effective engagement as an economic actor. Social rights, it may be argued, can’t be universal rights in the way that civil and political rights should be, because provision for healthcare, education and social security is beyond the means of many developing countries (Cranston, 1976). It is only through economic development that social development and welfare citizenship become possible (Wilensky, 1975). What is more, while it is right to seek to promote higher standards of healthcare, education and social security, resources to this end must be sparingly applied and directed to where needs are greatest. Second, asocial conservative/​moral-​authoritarian approaches subscribe to those kinds of argument that tend to dismiss the idea of social rights as heresy. This is an approach for which individual autonomy is synonymous with self-​sufficient survival: people should meet their own needs. The approach was reflected in the illiberal aspects of Benthamite utilitarianism. It had been evident in New Right critiques of the social rights concept (N. Barry, 1987) and the ideas of commentators such as Charles Murray (1984) which argue, if not for an end to the welfare state, that the coercive power of the state should be harnessed not so much to provide for human needs, as to make its citizens provide for themselves. Third, social conservative/​paternalistic approaches are concerned less with individual rights to autonomy and more with the identification and negotiation of shared interests. Social rights in modern welfare states represent the outcome of brokered compromises between different interest groups. In classic corporatist welfare states this is likely to entail explicit tripartite compromises between business interests, trade unions and government. To a greater or lesser extent, however, capitalist welfare states can all be regarded as the outcome of what Poulantzas (1980: 123) has called a ‘condensation of class forces’. Marshall’s conception of citizenship is criticised by Bottomore (1992) for its abstract nature. According to Marshall, citizenship is a logical settlement involving a state of equilibrium

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between abstract forces. In practice, Bottomore argues, even in liberal welfare regimes the demands of trade unions and the organised labour movement played a significant part in the development of welfare citizenship. Decisions about how the common needs of common people should be met may have involved significant compromises and were taken at a distance from those the labour movement purported to represent, but welfare citizenship had been the product of real-​life negotiation, rather than the application of abstract principles. Finally, it follows self-​evidently that social democratic approaches are the ostensible expression of a social rights approach. The Marshallian compromise is broadly consistent with the welfare citizenship settlement to be found in social democratic welfare states, such as those to be found in the Nordic countries, which are nonetheless largely successful capitalist economies. The social democratic settlement has its critics: for example, from both socialist and feminist perspectives, both of which might endorse more radical notions of social rights. Socialist and neo-​Marxist critics of the Marshallian compromise argue, on the one hand, that the welfare state has become both handmaiden and henchman for the market economy –​managing and controlling labour supply in the interests of capital (for example, Offe, 1984); and, on the other hand, that the application of liberal conceptions of individual rights is disempowering because it conceals the true character of capitalism’s exploitative social relations of power (for example, Holloway & Picciotto, 1978). Feminist and social movement critics of the Marshallian compromise argue, on the one hand, that the welfare state has perpetuated patriarchal, racialised and disabling relations of power in industrialised societies (for example, F.  Williams, 1989); and on the other hand, that the application of androgynous or ‘totalising’ concepts of citizenship ignore or negate the relevance of social diversity and differing experiences and understandings of human need (for example, Pateman, 1989). The limitations of welfare citizenship On several counts, welfare citizenship has been a failure. First, as is evident from Chapter 7, the survival of poverty and inequality in spite of the development of the welfare state may be regarded as ‘one of the wonders of the modern world’ (Seabrook, 1985: 12). Welfare citizenship may serve to ameliorate poverty and to abate need, but nowhere has it succeeded completely in eradicating it. Some would argue that welfare citizenship has been implicated in perpetuating certain forms of poverty (Novak, 1988; Squires, 1990). Second, in the developed countries of the global North, the nature of welfare citizenship has of late been increasingly reconstituted. Cox (1998) suggests that the conceptions of social rights have become more discursive and less associated with objective conditions of need (see also Moynes, 2010). Conventional explanations of the rise of welfare citizenship suggest that initially capitalist welfare states had

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elected to varying degrees to ‘de-​commodify’ the worker (Esping-​Andersen, 1990). That is to say, by providing for the basic needs of workers the state not only ensured the efficient reproduction of labour power, it also enabled workers –​ up to a point  –​to live independently of the labour market. Because certain services such as social insurance, healthcare and education became available, not as commercial commodities but as of right, labour power itself became less of a conventionally marketable commodity. However, around the end of the 20th century a trend began throughout the developed welfare states towards varying degrees of ‘recommodification’ (Esping-​Andersen, 1996; Offe, 1984). There have been several facets to this trend. At the level of labour market policy there was a trend away from demand-​side policy informed by Keynesian economics to supply-​side policy informed by Monetarist economics: the developed economies placed renewed emphasis upon maximising domestic labour market participation and productivity. But at the same time such economies sought new ways to moderate or constrain their social spending; to reduce the costs of welfare citizenship. Not only was labour power to be recommodified, but so were public services addressed to meeting human needs: through the direct privatisation of public goods and services or the outsourcing of functional elements of service provision to commercial or civil society providers; by promoting and incentivising private or informal provision for personal individual need. The World Trade Organisation sought to regulate against public sector monopolies in any form of human service provision (B. Deacon, 2007). And where social provision remained within the public sector, attempts were made to ‘marketise’ or ‘managerialise’ the sector; to import business methods of performance management and contrive mechanisms by which service providers must compete with one another. In the name of ‘modernising’ and ‘personalising’ service provision, a public service ethos was replaced with a customer service ethos (for example, J. Clarke, 2003; Henman & Fenger, 2006). Such attempts to reform state welfare have tended to reconstitute the citizen as a consumer. The essence of new governance approaches, whose tentacles have reached as far as the European Union and the World Bank (Bekkers et al, 2007; B. Deacon, 2007; Porter & Craig, 2004), is that when needs are met by the state, the recipient’s citizenship is defined more by her civil status than her social being. Goods such as healthcare, education and pensions are provided not to meet universal need, but are tailored to meet particular needs or preferences. Though such goods are available to everybody, an element of selectivity must apply to the transaction, even if this is limited to a requirement that the recipient must exercise choice, by choosing which hospital to attend, to which school to send her child, or to which pension fund to contribute. The focus is switched to the form as much as the substance of human service provision. Defenders of such reform claimed would be more effective than old-​style welfare citizenship (Le Grand, 2003), yet arguably it amounts to an erosion of the social citizenship ideal.

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The third sense in which welfare citizenship has failed is that, though in various guises it has been adopted by several post-​Soviet ‘transition’ countries (Cerami & Vanhuysse, 2009), it has proved itself to be, if not irrelevant, ill-​suited to many countries in the global South (for example, B. Deacon, 2007). Beyond the obvious obstacles faced by poorer nations in resourcing provision for welfare rights, there can be cultural obstacles where the ‘Western’ concepts of individual citizenship rights potentially conflict with the primacy that attaches to values such as loyalty and obedience in ‘non-​Western’ religious and philosophical traditions (Sen, 1999; Uvin, 2004). What is more, welfare citizenship is premised on two assumptions: first, that most citizens will meet their needs through earnings from paid employment in the labour market or within households sustained by such earnings; second, that a regulatory framework and some measure of provision for the needs of those excluded from labour market participation can be met under the aegis of a legitimate and functioning state apparatus. There are parts of the world where these assumptions do not completely hold or, indeed, may not hold at all. Gough, Wood et al (2004) have described different kinds of developing country regime. There are emergent welfare state regimes, for example, in several Latin American countries, but the provision or coverage of welfare provision is uneven, and there are extensive rural enclaves and urban favelas which remain in the grip of an informal economy in which neither market nor state are fully functional. Throughout much of East Asia there are what might be described as ‘productivist’ regimes where economic production is prioritised over social policy, and the role of the state remains relatively limited. Across South Asia there are what might be called ‘informal security’ regimes, where every day human needs must often be met through reliance on informal provision by family, kin and community. And in some parts of sub-​Saharan Africa there are what are best described as ‘insecurity’ regimes, where neither market nor state are functional, and everyday human needs may be met under the protection of chieftains, warlords, mafia leaders, corrupt officialdom or foreign aid workers. Finally, in China, the world’s most populous nation, recent economic reforms have delivered spectacular economic growth but, it is claimed, ‘destroyed its socialist welfare system centred on the principles of equality and human needs’ (Chan et al, 2008: 195). Welfare reform in China gathers pace, yet lags behind economic reform, and, in the absence of a liberal interpretation of democracy, what is emerging is not necessarily intended to represent a form of welfare citizenship. The fourth sense in which welfare citizenship has failed stems from issues associated with the enforcement of social rights. If human need is to be met through the creation of social rights, those rights should be enforceable. People who are denied their rights require some form of redress. This has been problematic. In practice, mechanisms of redress have generally involved the introduction of legal procedures and what has been called the ‘juridification’ of welfare (Teubner, 1987). Having recourse to judicial or quasi-​judicial forms of

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redress has implications because legal systems have been created as a forum in which to address civil not social rights. It may be argued that legal systems and welfare systems are simply incongruent. Fear of this has often motivated policy makers to insulate the administration of social welfare from judicial intervention; and it has motivated lawyers to resist involvement in matters of social policy for fear that their ‘judicial purity’ may be compromised (H. Dean, 2015: 118). When it does occur, juridification can expose the administration of welfare rights to disruptive interventions by judicial authorities that are ill-​suited to the task (Harden & Lewis, 1986), or else it can expose claimants to an alien process that reconstructs their problem in ways that may be unhelpful. . . . to say that someone has a legal problem is not a description of a state of fact; it is to suggest that he should take a certain course of action . . . whether this is so or not will often be debatable and it may be that the appropriate course of action will be such that we should prefer to speak of that person having a political problem. (Lewis, 1973) In spite of a growing body of national and international social rights jurisprudence (Langford, 2008) there is a fierce and continuing debate regarding the fundamental justiciability of social rights (Gearty & Mantouvalou, 2011) and as to the role that legal redress should or shouldn’t play in relation to the promotion and defence of welfare rights (Scheingold, 1974/2​ 004). This begs questions about the distinction to be made between legal justice and social justice, to which we shall return in the next section and again in Chapter 9 when we discuss the politics of need. A post-​Marshallian concept of social rights For the moment, we shall be underlining a contention that is central to the argument of this book, namely that social rights may be understood as articulations of human need. Marshall’s influential conception of social rights was associated with the birth of the capitalist welfare state. But as indicated in the thumbnail sketch of human history presented in Chapter 2, the human species had evolved ways of naming and claiming its needs long before the development of the first cities and the invention of formal citizenship; before the development of law and the invention of civil rights; before the development of politics and the invention of democratic rights (see also Isin et al, 2008). Social rights may be regarded as a constitutive feature of the human species. The basis for such an argument has previously been laid (see H. Dean, 2013) by drawing firstly, on Marx’s theory of human need and arguing that social rights are an expression of human sociality, as one of the constitutive characteristics of our species being (as discussed in Chapter 2). Secondly, it has been argued that social rights, like all rights, are not preordained or analytically divined, but

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have their origin in negotiation; in the dynamic processes by which top-​down prescription and bottom-​up demands are implicated in the evolving historical processes by which human needs are defined. Conceptualised in this way sociality and negotiation resonate –​albeit quite loosely –​with the notions of ‘group’ and ‘grid’ in cultural theory (Douglas, 1977: Ch. 2): sociality relates to the extent to which individuals are bound by and protected through social group membership; negotiation relates to the extent to which the rules and conventions of everyday life and communication are shaped within a grid of hegemonic and counter-​ hegemonic processes. In any particular society, community or social group, the motivation for the naming and claiming of needs, and for the social framing and negotiation of what might now be recognised as forms of social rights, will be affected by the relative strength of sociality within that group and by the extent to which negotiation is reflexive (and ideologically elaborated) or constrained (and ideologically conservative). This may be illustrated –​somewhat speculatively –​in the final taxonomy to be presented in this book (Figure 8.2). From this perspective social rights are dynamic and multi-​layered. They have been and are capable of further evolving as a ubiquitous feature of human history, reflecting the habits of everyday survival, the customs of protective communities, the utilitarian practices of market economies and the cosmopolitan principles informing inclusive human societies. Social rights may be negotiated at a multiplicity of sites, ranging from the local to the global; and in a multiplicity of ways, ranging from the suboptimal to the emancipatory. Social rights are the articulation of the means by which human beings –​however imperfectly –​negotiate their interdependency; by which they express the claims they would make upon others and recognise the claims that others may make upon them. Figure 8.2: A speculative taxonomy of the historical manifestations of social rights REFLEXIVE NEGOTIATION

utilitarian practices

cosmopolitan principles

LIMITED SOCIALITY

STRONG SOCIALITY habits of survival

customs of community

CONSTRAINED NEGOTIATION

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Justice or humanity? Social rights in the sense discussed earlier are fundamentally premised on social interdependency; on the ways in which human beings care for one another; and not upon legal principles of justice and justiciability, important though these may be in certain circumstances. Just as we began in Chapter  3 to question essentially liberal-​individualist notions of human dignity by considering radical humanist notions of human caring, we might now question essentially liberal-​ individualist notions of justice by considering radical humanist notions of what constitutes humanity. As a legal and ethical concept, ‘justice’ is ‘the language of complaint’ (Campbell, 1988: 1) and may be concerned as much with punishment and retribution for the commission of wrongs as with the promotion and enforcement of rights. The widely used term social justice is capable of a variety of interpretations (B. Barry, 2005). It is ‘a “feel good” term that almost all can subscribe to’ (Piachaud, 2008: 33). Social justice became the watchword of European social democratic political parties in Europe in the second half of the 20th century but was absorbed as a central tenet of ‘Third Way’ thinking in the 1990s (Giddens, 1998) and even captured in the rhetoric of right-​wing conservatives (as in the case of the Centre for Social Justice, an ‘independent’ think tank founded in the UK by Iain Duncan Smith, MP –​www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/​). Dominant conceptions of social justice, I would contend, are underpinned by an essentially liberal-​individualist perspective (cf. Young, 2008): a perspective associated with material justice between social groups, albeit with particular reference to equality of incomes or material outcomes between individuals belonging to different social and/​or cultural groups and the extent to which inequalities may be ‘just’. Justice, in the last instance, is a matter of equity; of equivalence within a calculus of material outcomes and individual opportunities. In so far as social justice is concerned with upholding social rights, its underlying premises from a liberal perspective are largely shared with those of civil justice and civil rights; they have roots in liberal conceptions of law. Marxist theorists of the law under capitalism have asserted that such foundational concepts as equity, restitution and entitlement are all ‘derived’ from the fetishised commodity form (Holloway & Picciotto, 1978; Pashukanis, 1978). The exchange of commodities forms the very basis of social life under capitalism. But just as ‘value’ is a concept that defines our understanding of the nature and character of commodities, so the ‘right’ of possession defines our understanding of the nature and character of human beings who as proprietors (of their own labour power, if nothing else) are for legal purposes atomised juridical subjects. The principles of justice, therefore, are essentially derived from ideologically constructed understandings of equivalence between the value not of people as social beings, but of possessions produced and exchanged under ‘free’ or self-​regulating market

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conditions. This abstract argument is important for the questions it raises about our understanding of value and its connection to human need: about whether that which has ontological value for human beings coincides with or defines that which existentially they need. But let us consider the way in which current debates about global justice and injustice are conducted and in particular arguments about tackling global poverty. In so doing it should be noted that just as social rights as defined earlier are negotiated at a multiplicity of sites and levels, justice functions within a multiplicity of ‘spheres’ (Walzer, 1983):  in everyday lives, considerations of justice apply within families, within local communities and within nation states. By grasping for their application in a global context I am deliberately exploring the widest generalities. An attempt to present a cosmopolitan model of global justice has been offered by Gillian Brock (2009). In doing so, she asserts the importance of a needs-​based account, which she contends is more fundamental and ‘basic’ than a human rights account. Human rights can be ‘explained’ in terms of basic needs, being that which human beings require ‘to function minimally well’ (2009: 72). Global justice is seen to flow from a thin conception of human need. Brock discusses reform of the international tax regime and the role of humanitarian aid as means for addressing global poverty, and she addresses conceptual issues of equality and democracy, but she does not quite follow in the footsteps of authors such as Falk (1994), D. Held (1995), Delanty (2000) or Pogge (2002; 2007) in calling for any form of global or cosmopolitan citizenship through which social rights might be advanced. To focus on one such author, Thomas Pogge rails against ‘the clear-​cut injustice of the global order’ (2007:  52) that not only tolerates but exacerbates global poverty. For Pogge, this is a result of institutional failure. His cosmopolitan vision is of a multi-​layered institutional order, with a vertical distribution of sovereignty. He, like Brock, sees certain solutions in improvements to democratic processes and international tax arrangements, but he links the cause of global justice with a thicker concept not of basic needs, but ‘human flourishing’ (2002: Ch. 1). David Held has expressly advocated a form of ‘Global Social Democracy’ (2004). The assumption shared by Pogge and Held is that institutional reform that accords with cosmopolitan principles will be consistent with a global enhancement of social justice. An alternative view, however, has been advanced by Tom Campbell who argues that poverty amounts to a violation of human rights, not because it is unjust, but because it is an affront to humanity. Human rights, he asserts, derive ‘from the existence of certain human needs’ (2007: 59). And poverty, he claims, violates human rights in the same sense that slavery or torture do, since it denies the essential humanity of the person. Rather curiously, Campbell makes a passing association between his concept of human needs and Sen’s conception of capabilities, which arguably perhaps is at odds with Campbell’s past work, in which

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he has aligned himself with a socialist perspective on rights (1983) and in which he discusses the Marxist critique of justice (1988: Ch. 7). He is clear nevertheless, that social rights are rights to resources required for the full development of socialised human nature. Poverty is a violation of human rights not because of injustice, but because of inhumanity; it is a failure not of institutions but of human solidarity. His preferred response is concerned not in the first instance with institutional reform, but is humanitarian: a global levy based on the humanitarian obligation to participate in the relief of suffering, and imposed on all citizens whose personal income and/​or wealth exceeds some universally agreed level. Whatever the merits of Campbell’s policy proposal, the implication that may be inferred from his reasoning is that the denial of human rights –​including social rights –​is dehumanising; very much in the sense that Mikkola (2016; and see Chapter 7) speaks of dehumanisation. The essential ‘wrong’ of that which may (in whatever context) be identified as social injustice is the avoidable denial or violation of a human ‘right’ and of a person’s humanity. The radical humanist critique that is emerging piecemeal throughout this book acknowledges that there are no eternal verities when it comes to defining human need, merely the outcomes of struggle throughout human history for human fulfilment; for valuable or ‘ethical’ lives; for committed ‘wrongs’ to be succeeded by socially constructed ‘rights’. Despite the ambiguities of ‘social justice’ and ‘social rights’, they have been and remain powerful interlinking discourses within the historical process; discourses capable of strategic deployment –​to which we shall shortly turn in the concluding chapter of this book. It should be emphasised that in this chapter on social rights, the critiques presented do not mean that we should dismiss the concept or the importance of actually exiting forms of social rights and welfare citizenship, or attempts to achieve social justice. Amartya Sen (in UNDP, 2000:  Ch. 1) has drawn upon Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties to argue that just because the rights demanded by or on behalf of the poor are neglected or repudiated by those with the power to observe them, this does not mean that such rights do not exist. Rights are social constructs, and the language of rights provides a valuable discursive resource through which to name and claim human needs. The language of rights has a certain ‘alchemical’ force in the struggles of oppressed people. Referring specifically of the experiences of African-​Americans in the US, Patricia Williams has asserted: I by no means want to idealize the importance of rights … [which] are so often selectively invoked to draw boundaries, to isolate, and to limit … [but] for the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of humanity: rights imply a respect which places one within the referential range of self and others, which elevates one’s status from human body to social being. . . . ‘Rights’ feels so new in the mouths of most black people. It is so

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deliciously empowering to say. . . . The concept of rights, both positive and negative, is the marker of our citizenship, our participatoriness, our relation to others. (P. Williams, 1987: 405, 416, 431) We shall see, therefore, that a discourse of rights inevitably has a role to play in the politics of human need.

Conclusion/​Summary This chapter has: • Been concerned with the ways in which needs are translated into, or articulated as, social rights, whether these are expressed as ‘second generation’ human rights or as social rights of citizenship within a welfare state. • Drawn distinctions:​ ◊ between doctrinally articulated rights, which are prescribed and handed down to the people from above and claims-​based articulations which are formulated and demanded by the people from below; ◊ between ‘thinly’ conceived formal rights whose bearers are abstractly construed as self-​determining individual actors and ‘thickly’ conceived substantive rights whose bearers are construed as potentially vulnerable and interdependent beings. • Proposed a taxonomy or model that draws on these two distinctions and which supplements the taxonomies of needs-​based approaches and welfare regimes presented in Chapter 6, with four corresponding categories of rights:​ ◊ personal rights which characterise responses in liberal regimes to particular need; ◊ conditional rights which characterise responses in asocial conservative regimes to circumstantial need; ◊ protective rights which characterise responses in social conservative regimes to common need; and ◊ citizenship rights which characterise responses in social democratic regimes to universal need. • Discussed the concept of social citizenship: ◊ considering first, the classic Marshallian compromise which envisaged a functional equilibrium between a capitalist market economy, liberal democracy and a welfare state supported by a combination of civil, political and social rights as constituent elements of a modern form of citizenship; and reflecting further on the different ways in which capitalist welfare states have in practice evolved; ◊ addressing the limitations of welfare state citizenship as a form of social citizenship and in particular –​how it has failed to abate poverty; how in the

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global North, it has been diluted –​especially by managerial reform; how in the global South, its principles have proved to be partly or wholly irrelevant; how such mechanisms as have been provided for enforcing social rights of citizenship have been weak or inappropriate; ◊ suggesting an alternative post-​Marshallian conception of social rights, which regards social rights as socially negotiated articulations of human need that have evolved throughout human history –​as human beings established the habits, the customs, the practices and principles by which they named and claimed their needs –​thus preceding civil and political rights; and which will continue to evolve in a multiplicity of ways and at a multiplicity of sites or levels. • Engaged in debate as to the distinction between justice and humanity as opposing premises for the moral case for social rights, focusing on:​ ◊ the liberal-​individualist underpinnings of the concept of social justice and a radical humanitarian critique; ◊ prevailing ideas regarding the prospects of a form of cosmopolitan or global social citizenship as a means through which to combat global poverty; ◊ the argument that the failure to meet human need is dehumanising; a wrong that offends a social right.

Challenging questions 1 . In what ways do social rights give expression to human needs? 2. Should the satisfaction of a person’s human needs have to depend upon her being a citizen of a welfare state?

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9 The politics of human need

This chapter will:

• • •

present a reprise of the key arguments that have been developed so far; open a discussion regarding the politics of need; advance the idea of a radical humanist ‘needs-​first ethic’ as a basis for future approaches to and understandings of social policy.

This is a book addressed in the first instance –​but by no means exclusively –​to an academic social policy audience. There is a very obvious sense in which social policy engages with issues of human need: with people’s needs for various forms of human services and to be safeguarded from various kinds of harm. In the ordinary course of our lives we need health provision, education, housing and social security, and at times of special vulnerability we may need personal care and protection. However, the relevance of this book extends beyond academic social policy to substantive political worlds: to the politics of intimate relationships and of everyday life; the politics of local public service planning and delivery; the politics of national policy making; the politics of global governance.

Reprise The preceding chapters have revolved around two broad themes:  competing understandings of human need; and the possibility of a radical alternative understanding. The account began by challenging the reader to think about the different and contradictory ways in which people talk about everyday human needs and the different meanings to be found in everyday discourse. It then stepped back to consider a broad-​brush history of the human species and the competing ways in which the species came to understand itself and its place in the world, pointing to contrasting strands of secular humanism, in which contemporary meanings might, broadly speaking, be reflected. However, there is also a form of radical humanism, originally distilled from the writings of Marx, that is not reflected in contemporary meanings, but which defines the constitutive characteristics of our species being and, by implication, the dynamics of human need.

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The argument then turned to finding ways to unpick the distinction between what have been called absolute or ‘basic’ needs, on the one hand, and relative needs or mere ‘wanting’, on the other. One way to do so is to distinguish between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ interpretations of need and needing, where ‘thin’ needs are concerned with human survival and ‘thick’ needs with human flourishing. It is a distinction with roots in classical philosophy, but reflected in contemporary understandings of human well-being which may prioritise: on the one hand, individual needs not merely for the biological necessities of life and personal safety, but also, perhaps, for some sense of basic dignity and the opportunity to secure an adequate livelihood and some reasonable measure of individual ‘happiness’; or on the other, solidaristic needs for collective belonging and social inclusion, for caring and relational well-being, and for shared accomplishment and human fulfilment. The other distinction to be drawn is between needs that are articulated from the ‘top-​down’ through established theories and those which are articulated from the ‘bottom-​up’ through everyday practices. The process by which needs are named and claimed is dynamic: top-​down doctrines handed down by rulers, priests and sages can become the received wisdom that informs everyday practice, while bottom-​up demands and resistance can inform the emergence of new reflexive thinking. Human needs are realised and understood through continual interaction between theories and practices. These two distinctions –​‘thin’ versus ‘thick’ and ‘top-​down’ versus ‘bottom-​ up’ –​represent the essential and fluid dimensions within which approaches to human need have emerged. Previous chapters have considered some of the dominant approaches adopted within academia, but also the influences manifested in the development of existing welfare state regimes (see the diagrammatic summary presented in Table 9.1). Attention has been paid on the one hand to the failure of welfare states and social development policies to abate processes of social disadvantage and, on the other, to the part played by the idea of rights to needs satisfaction and the development of social rights. It has been argued that social rights may be conceptualised as articulations of human needs and that in this sense, social rights were not invented by the modern welfare state, but are a manifestation of an inherent feature of the multitude of ways in which human beings can and have throughout history sought to name and claim their needs as human beings. In the process of this analysis, the book has at various points drawn attention to an approach which stands outside the various taxonomies presented in preceding chapters. The approach is associated with Marx’s radical humanism. It is an approach which defines human need theoretically in terms of the historically constitutive characteristics of the human species; which –​through the concept of sociality  –​embodies a distinctively ‘thick’ understanding of human need premised on the axiomatic social interdependence of the human species; and which presents a critique of the way in which social relations under capitalism

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Table 9.1: Diagrammatic summary of argument regarding competing understandings of human need Which are reflected in the assumptions of:

And are commensurate with conceptions of need that are:

Within welfare regimes that may be categorised as:

Which administer rights that are:

And have origins, historically speaking, in:

Economistic meanings

Liberal-​individualist humanism

Particular

Liberal

Personal

Utilitarian practices

Moralistic meanings

Supremacist humanism

Circumstantial

Asocial conservative

Conditional

Habits of survival

Paternalistic meanings

Conservative-​solidaristic humanism

Common

Social Conservative

Protective

Customs of community

Socially reformist meanings

Reformist-​solidaristic humanism

Universal

Social democratic

Citizenship

Cosmopolitan principles

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​__​_​ _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​​_​_​_​_​_​_​ (see Chapter 1)

(see Chapter 2)

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​__​_​

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​__​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​

(see Chapter 6)

(see Chapter 8)

Note: This is a summary of a heuristic modelling process that encompasses associations that some readers may feel to be in some respects ambiguous or tenuous. The intention, however, is to provoke reflection and debate, rather than to provide a definitive or incontrovertible account.

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Everyday contemporary discourses of need may incorporate:

Understanding Human Need

distort our understanding of human need by propagating fetishised understandings of ‘value’ and of what is to be valued within human life. What social reformers might condemn as injustice might more radically be regarded as dehumanisation.

A different politics of demand The post-​Marshallian conception of social rights for which this book has argued brings a particular perspective to bear upon the evolving processes by which human beings have made claims or demands upon one another. Those processes are continually changing. In this section we shall briefly consider changes that have been occurring since the creation of ‘modern’ welfare states in the mid-​ 20th century and review a spectrum of alternative thinking that has emerged. The changing politics of welfare The old politics of welfare had been quintessentially associated with the idea of the ‘welfare state’. First use of the term ‘welfare state’ is attributed to Archbishop William Temple (1941; and see Timmins, 2001: 36) who in the midst of the Second World War held out the hope that, when the war was over, Britain’s warfare state, or ‘power state’, and its monolithic and burgeoning administrative apparatus could be converted –​like a sword into a ploughshare –​into a peaceable and benevolent welfare state. The term caught on, not just in Britain, but throughout the developed world. Rather than reverting to a night-​watchman role and leaving provision for human need to the vicissitudes of the free market, the state could forge a new peacetime contract with its citizens. As mentioned in Chapter 8, the coming of the welfare state and the development of social rights of citizenship involved an element of de-​commodification, in terms both of labour power and the human services required to reproduce and sustain labour power. Graham Room has suggested this represented a shift from a system of distribution based on a cash nexus, to one based on a ‘needs nexus’ (1979: 59). But in another sense the process reflected a reluctant compromise between economistic liberal and social reformist approaches to need. That compromise was not consistently drawn and could be unstable. Titmuss (1962) expressed concern that using the expression ‘welfare state’ to refer to any post-​war Western democratic society elided the reality that welfare states were not static or uniform institutions; that in a rapidly changing world some were by no means unambiguously benign. On the contrary, the welfare state could readily be implicated in perpetuating social inequalities. While increasing levels of social and public expenditure in affluent societies –​such as Britain –​had indeed provided ‘a better ordered, more efficient, more civilised social environment’, it was clear that ‘the rich benefited more than the poor … [because] … they knew how to make better use of this environment for more dignified living’

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(1962: 52). If the brave new world captured in Temple’s vision of a ‘welfare state’ did not come to pass quite as he might have envisioned, a state mediated needs nexus did now coexist with a market mediated cash nexus. Though expenditure levels varied between different welfare state regimes, provision for human need was systematically organised through a democratic state apparatus. There was a politics of welfare. In the meantime the expression ‘welfare’ –​and especially ‘social welfare’ –​ took on a narrower and more pejorative meaning as a particular kind of state intervention addressed especially to ‘the poor’. In the US, the term ‘welfare’ is specifically applied  –​not to social expenditures on health, education and pensions  –​but to stigmatised forms of means-​tested social assistance for the poorest of people. Increasingly, the ambiguity acquired by the word ‘welfare’ was reflected in the tone of current debates about ‘welfare reform’ across the Western world (for example, Lister, 2001). Nicholas Deakin, in his book, The Politics of Welfare (1994), recalls from his own childhood an association between the term ‘welfare’ and the distinctive taste of the processed ‘welfare orange juice’ supplied by the local authority children’s clinic. The welfare state enhanced the satisfaction of human needs across society, but for some members of society, it came with a slightly unpleasant flavour. Welfare states have since been beset by two global crises –​the first triggered initially by the oil price shock of 1973 and the second following the global financial crisis of 2008 –​each of which had far-​reaching and long-​lasting political as well as economic repercussions. The decades following the first crisis witnessed the trend, already outlined in Chapter 8, to partial re-​commodification of welfare provision and the managerialisation of surviving public services. As the New Right ideological orthodoxies of Reagan and Thatcher gave way to the more pragmatic ‘Third Way’ orthodoxies of Clinton and Blair (Giddens, 1998; Jordan, 1998) the role of the welfare state initially in the Anglophone world was re-​envisioned. Its job was no longer to meet individual needs but to enable its citizens better to manage risk; not so much to underwrite social rights as to promote individual responsibility. The essential infrastructure of the welfare state may have survived the ‘ideological blizzard’ fomented by the New Right (Le Grand, 1990b: 350), but now it would undergo a technocratic shift. The old politics of need associated with the post-​Second World War welfare state were conjured out of sight and replaced by ‘modernised’ forms of governance (J. Clarke & Newman, 1997). Such trends impacted to a greater or lesser extent upon all welfare regimes amounting by the turn of the 21st century to what might be described as a general ‘re-​set’ (Garland, 2016). The second crisis has perhaps not so much triggered new trends as intensified trends already in the making, in particular by reinforcing a liberal drive to economic austerity and constraint on welfare spending, to which social democratic and social conservative welfare regimes were far from immune. Insofar as there

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has been mainstream political resistance to austerity it has taken the form of calls for ‘social investment’ strategies (Hemerijck, 2013; Jenson, 2017; Morel et al, 2012), striking a compromise between liberal economic and social agendas that is in many ways more conservative than reformist, since the aim, it would seem, is to achieve a further ‘re-​set’ by which to rescue or conserve elements of the old politics of welfare (H. Dean, 2019: Ch. 10). At the same time, what has also been amplified in the wake of the 2008 global crisis is a resurgence of an asocial conservative agenda, in the form of an unprincipled populist politics that is hostile to the needs of migrants and minorities. Meanwhile, in the global South the politics of need tended to be associated not with the social rights of welfare state citizenship, but with struggles to achieve the social rights promised by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the pursuit of social development promised by the so-​called ‘third generation’ of human rights already mentioned in Chapter 8. In the event, the UDHR has offered little substantive purchase for a politics of need. The UN Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights was created belatedly in 1985 to monitor the implementation of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and to receive quinquennial reports from signatory state parties and occasional submissions from non-​governmental organisations, but its jurisdiction is restricted to the making of ‘general comments’ upon the implementation or violation of rights (for example, Hunt, 1996). The third generation of human rights portended by the 1986 Declaration of the Right to Development implied not only individual rights, but collective, group and solidarity rights. This, however, has not so much added to the canon of rights already set out in the ICESCR as brought an element of ambiguity to the question of whether substantive needs claims are to be framed by citizens against their individual nation states or by poor nations against the wider international community. Paradoxically, perhaps, this has served further to marginalise the idea that social rights may be regarded as a global species of human rights that could or should in themselves be inalienable and unconditional. Certainly, aspirations based, for example, on group-​rights to self-​determination and/​or cultural freedom (Kymlicka, 1995; Perez-​Bustillo, 2001) seek to enlarge our understanding of civil and political rights, but not social rights. In the struggle for the right to development, social rights have tended to take a back seat. The new social movements of the global South and their academic allies –​the post-​ development theorists –​tend to be hostile to the role of the state as a guarantor of welfare, or else they seek to transcend what they dismiss as the mere ‘politics of demand’ in favour of more worthy forms of political participation (Escobar, 1995; Waterman, 2001). It has been suggested that there is a fear on the part of some ‘new’ social movements that the class-​based demands of the ‘old’ Western-​ style labour movements may lead too easily to the kind of state-​corporatism that can be inimical to democracy (Foweraker & Landman, 1997).

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Despite the intentions of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (Köhler et al, 2014; UN, 2015) it may be argued that the struggle for social development continues to take second place to struggles for political emancipation. Demands for the satisfaction of base needs are subordinated to the principled pursuit of a higher need for political autonomy and self-​governance. The old politics of welfare associated with the capitalist North would seem to have become inherently suspect. It is regarded as a hollow and ineffectual ‘politics of demand’. At one level, this bespeaks the extent to which faith has been lost in the capitalist welfare state model as a means of addressing human need. At another, it may imply an ascendancy of doctrinal liberalism at the expense of everyday claims making. Alternative strategies There have been responses to the deficiencies of the old politics of welfare. We have considered in Chapter 5 the role of public participation in policy making and of ‘insurgent claims making’ whereby bottom-​up demands can to some extent make themselves heard. However, the former are usually state managed and the latter are inevitably sporadic in nature. We also touched in Chapter 8 on the extent to which the justiciability of social rights provides channels for legal as well as political claims-​making strategies, though it is generally acknowledged that what is sometimes called ‘cause-​lawyering’ (Sarat & Schiengold, 2001) plays only a supporting role in relation to wider political strategies. Some attempts have been made to apply Marx’s theory of human need to the development of democratic socialist strategies, albeit in ways that should not descend into the authoritarianism of Soviet-​style central planning. Kate Soper draws explicitly on Marx to argue that capitalist societies that rely upon market forces to ‘read-​off’ people’s needs from what they consume are simply evading the question of human need (1981: 215–​16), but she recognises that a form of politics that plans for the meeting of human needs must find ways to assimilate and coordinate huge amounts of complex information about people’s needs upon which to base its decisions. The challenge for a politics of need is to establish mechanisms for social participation in the making of such decisions (1981: 210–​11). This idea chimes, up to a point, with Nancy Fraser’s concept of a politics of needs interpretation (N. Fraser, 1989: Ch. 8; but see also discussion in Chapters 4, 5 and 6), to which, however, we shall shortly return. More recently, however, Jeff Noonan (2006) has made a similar attempt to envision a project for an authentic form of social (as opposed to liberal) democracy, premised on a needs-​based social morality. In this attempt, Noonan draws on the one hand upon McMurty’s (1999; 2002) interpretation of Marx, prioritising ‘life value’ (as opposed to economic value) as the basis for social morality; and on the other hand upon Devine’s (1998) proposals for the negotiated coordination of a democratic society. It might be noted that Noonan’s approach is in some

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respects at odds with Marx’s theory of need. He insists upon a distinction between needs and wants, and though this fits with Marx’s condemnation of spurious manufactured needs, it appears at odds with the idea that authentic needs are those that are constitutive of our human species being and are therefore not fixed: they can develop and expand with social progress and in the course of human history. Noonan sides instead with Amartya Sen to link human fulfilment with the freedom of individual capability development, omitting to acknowledge the extent to which social interdependency is a constitutive characteristic of humanity’s species being. Nevertheless this should not detract from Noonan’s insightful emphasis on human need as opposed to market exchange as the basis for determining ‘value’ and upon the fundamental significance of social negotiation (cf Figure 8.2 and Chapter 8) for the process by which such determinations occur. There are also approaches which, rather than imagining projects of wholesale participatory democratic reform as the basis for a politics of human need, think pragmatically in terms of opportunistic or piecemeal multidimensional strategies. For example, Alex Callinicos (2003) in his Anti-​Capitalist Manifesto, suggests ways in which familiar demands for reform, that already command levels of support across a variety of constituencies, might be advanced in concert so as to mount a fundamental challenge to global capitalism. He argues for the pursuit on a global basis of universal basic income schemes, progressive and redistributive forms of taxation, widespread reductions in working hours and the defence of public services. There may be significant limitations to any one of these reforms, but taken together they are reforms that bring particular aspects of human need to the fore. And if we return to the work of Nancy Fraser, we can perhaps find another. Fraser has not explicitly returned in recent writing to her original idea of a politics of needs interpretation, but she has addressed the question of how to reframe understandings of ‘justice’ in a globalising world (2010). In Chapter 8 it is similarly argued that we might reconsider notions of justice and injustice in terms of humanity and dehumanisation. Fraser considers the bizarre or ‘abnormal’ ways in which patently contradictory discourses of justice can be brought to bear in the context of competing distributive priorities, group interests and institutional frameworks (2010: Ch. 4). In response, she suggests, we might attempt in the first instance to frame new understandings; or secondly, to confront the contradictions between existing understandings, or else thirdly, to adopt a discourse of ‘reflexive justice’. … given the magnitude of first-​order injustice in today’s world, the worst conceivable response would be to treat ongoing meta-​disputes as a license for paralysis. Thus, it is imperative not to allow discursive abnormalities to defer or dissipate efforts to remedy injustice. The expression ‘reflexive justice’ expresses that dual commitment, signalling

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a genre of theorising that works at two levels at once: entertaining urgent claims on behalf of the disadvantaged, while also parsing the meta-​disagreements that are interlaced with them. (2010: 73) If, in this context, we may interpret the term ‘injustice’ as the denial of human need or as ‘dehumanisation’, the call for reflexive justice would amount to an endorsement of what is attempted in this book. Preceding chapters have sought to provide a systematic examination of competing discourses and understandings of human need; of the contradictory ways in which needs may be interpreted, publicised and translated into social rights; and of the diverse and, arguably, often suboptimal ways in which substantive policies ostensibly directed to addressing human need have historically evolved and continue to play out. The job of academic social policy in a changing world is reflexively to observe, critique and inform the full range of actually existing policy regimes and currently emerging policy initiatives, to seek and publicise alternative conceptualisations of human need, as well as, perhaps, to promote new or alternative ideas for the fulfilment of human need.

A needs-​first ethic And it is to the framing of an alternative idea to which we now finally turn. The world we inhabit is largely dominated, whether implicitly or explicitly, by a hegemonic liberal individualist understanding of human need, consistent with the principles and practices of capitalism. It is a world in which pessimists forecast that capitalism itself faces ‘a long and painful period of cumulative decay’ (Streek, 2016: 72); and/​or a world that is currently ‘incompatible’ with a shift towards a needs-​based economy (Gough, 2018: 209). To change this would require not an idea, but radical action or ‘praxis’; the enactment in practice of critical theory. Marx’s radical humanism offers a theory of radical human need. Unfortunately, the word ‘radical’ is so widely and casually used as to have lost meaning. It has been used to define all forms of extremist political or religious beliefs, regardless of how distorted, dehumanised or devoid of principled substance those beliefs might be. Reflecting upon the monstrous excesses of fascist totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt concluded that they resulted not from radically evil thinking, but ‘thoughtlessness’; from a total absence of moral reasoning; from ‘thought-​ defying banality’. She argued that ‘only the good has depth and can be radical’ (1978:  250–​1). Affirming insights from both Aristotle and Marx (though she would never acknowledge her debt to the latter –​see Weisman, 2014: 1–​2), Arendt contended that critical reason is itself the most constitutive of human capacities since it defines what it takes for any human being to be good and to live well (Yarbrough & Stern, 1981). The suppression of critical thought is dehumanising (and the complete opposite of ‘radicalisation’).

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How might we radicalise social policy and the understanding of human need upon which social policies are predicated? Previous argument has favoured a eudaimonic ethic in social policy, premised on what might be called a ‘life-​first’ approach (H. Dean, 2014; 2015). One might equally well argue for a needs-​first ethic: the terms may be regarded as more or less interchangeable. But we might now perhaps consider whether ‘reflexively’ prioritising the radical essence of human need provides the clearer normative foundation for the critical evaluation and analysis of social policies and of human struggles over needs; over what it means to live well and achieve the fulfilment of our species being. To espouse a needs-​first ethic does not necessarily require us to prescribe the social policies of the future, but to prioritise that which is required for the realisation of the constitutive characteristics of humanity; to reflect such priority in the way that analysis and debate are discursively framed; to foreground fundamental questions regarding dominant assumptions about what is needed to be fully human. Those constitutive characteristics, to draw on Marx, may be summarised under four broad headings, which are presented here not in any order of relative importance, since they are all intimately interconnected. Consciousness One of the priorities of a radical needs-​first ethic would be to nourish human consciousness; that is to say, the form of consciousness that distinguishes humanity from other species. Consciousness is an elusive concept, but we sought in Chapter 2 to capture the sense in which, for Marx, ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ were not separate facets of individual human existence but essentially interdependent elements of a human being’s unique capacity for a critical yet inter-​subjectively generated awareness; an awareness of her being in the world, of that which she does, of her relationships with others and of her place in history; an awareness, however, that can be constrained by humanity’s own failings. To promote policies and practices for the development of conscious personality, it is also necessary to oppose those which are liable to constrain it and fundamentally to question dominant assumptions about the capacity of every human being for critical consciousness. Insofar as Doyal and Gough’s influential theory of human need attends to consciousness, it does so through the concept of autonomy. According to Doyal and Gough, basic human needs consist of physical health on the one hand and, on the other, such autonomy of agency as is minimally necessary for a human being to function. Among the determinants of basic autonomy, they would include mental as well as physical health, relevant cognitive understanding and significant life-​course opportunities (1991: 61–​6). But optimal needs satisfaction additionally requires ‘critical autonomy’; a higher level of autonomy associated with political freedom and with the opportunity to ‘question and to participate in agreeing or changing the rules’ (1991: 67). It is recognised by implication that

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what Doyal and Gough call critical autonomy (which we might here call human consciousness) is not the autonomy of an isolated and independent individual, but of the connected and engaged political subject. In this sense critical autonomy is indeed a condition precedent for a politics of needs. Doyal and Gough’s concern was that, to be effective, the participation required to achieve critical autonomy requires more than culturally specific competencies, but an awareness of alternative cultural realities (1991: 187–​9). It is not enough that people should be free to participate in a society if the cultural milieu of that society is repressive: they should be free to challenge or to reject that which is unacceptable in such a society. In this context Doyal and Gough place special emphasis on educational needs, including the importance of higher education. We shall see in a moment that other commentators have more to say about the character of educational provision. But the nourishment of what Doyal and Gough call critical autonomy –​the capacity reflexively to act within and upon reality –​requires more than formal educational provision. Vygotsky (1978), in an attempt to develop a new psychological theory of consciousness, argued that human beings’ development and their capacity for critical autonomy are dependent not only on education, but also on the vital ‘interpsychological’ processes embodied in human relationships within families, communities and the gamut of formal and informal social institutions that shape people’s lives. Consciousness is the outcome of the all-​encompassing social environment. The nourishment of consciousness is a process not confined to formal institutions, whether religious or secular, nor indeed to any particular stage of the life-​course: it occurs in the course of all human activity and social interaction. Critical autonomy demands critical reason. When Arendt argued that critical reason is required for any human being to be good and to live well (see earlier) she was asserting that such reason is not the prerogative of philosophers, but the means by which all human beings can know for themselves what is right: for Arendt, consciousness was the foundation for conscience and has moral as well as cognitive meaning (Parekh, 2008: Ch. 6). In response to the ‘culture of silence’ that he observed to be maintained through the influence of church and state among disadvantaged peoples in his native Brasil and elsewhere in world, Paulo Freire (1972) sought to define and to advocate a process of ‘conscientization’.1 Like Arendt, Freire appears here constructively to conflate ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’. He sought the ‘redemption’ of the oppressed and their oppressors alike from the dehumanising effects of hegemonic oppression, in which oppressive educational processes may be implicated. Freire –​and Illich (1971) for ­example –​saw dominant educational practices as fundamentally disabling, and he sought specifically to foster an alternative dialogical model of education (Freire, 1974); a model that would not entail merely ‘depositing’ knowledge upon passive students, but drawing out the students’ conscious awareness. The focus was upon equality of status and mutual recognition as between teachers

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and students and an erosion of the distinction between academic/​intellectual and practical/​vocational learning. The object was not to prepare children for docile labour, but to allow them to discover their ‘ontological vocation’. Freire’s views on the development of critical consciousness had influence on the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America, on notions of ‘critical pedagogy’ (Kincheloe, 2008) and on progressive-​libertarian approaches to education in the global North (Maylor, 2012). But the notions of ‘conscientization’ and critical consciousness potentially have wider significance for the defence as well as the fostering of human consciousness and of human intellect. Antonio Gramsci has expressly argued that reasoning and intellect are constitutive capacities of every human being. Grasmci drew a distinction between ‘traditional’ intellectuals who function to service and perpetuate dominant ideologies and the ‘organic’ intellectuals who function to foment and perpetuate bottom-​up counter-​hegemonic ideologies. Not everyone is seen to function in society as an intellectual, but Gramsci contended that because human beings can think, they are all essentially intellectual. Although ‘… it can happen that everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor’ (Gramsci, 1971: 9). All unimpaired human beings are able to think and to reason and have the potential to engage in intellectual processes, as readily as they can engage in a range of practical and creative activities. Obstacles to the fulfilment of intellect and creativity of which human consciousness is comprised can lie simply in the mind-​numbing effects of the arduous struggle for existence that can befall less advantaged human beings; in the effects of conservative ideologies that would instil order and obedience among the masses; or in ‘empty’ (cf Laclau, 2005) forms of populist anti-​intellectualism that denigrate intellectual discourse as pro-​establishment, elitist and/​or contrary to popular ‘common sense’ understanding. Anti-​intellectualism as a form of alienated consciousness may be seen as a characteristic of unprincipled populist politics alluded to earlier (and see Jacoby, 2008; Rooksby, 2012). It can be a reaction to exclusion and powerlessness. But while railing against those characterised by Gramsci as ‘traditional’ intellectuals of the establishment, populist anti-​ intellectualism fails to overcome the culture of silence. It can instead, create its own void, which may frustrate the emergence of counter-​hegemonic popular movements and counterproductively stifle processes of conscientization. Learning, as a necessary foundation for critical consciousness, is not necessarily formally acquired, but potentially systemically assimilated throughout the human life-​ course. It is a part of all human activity (‘work’) and social engagement (‘sociality’). Work The priority of a radical needs-​first ethic so far as ‘work’ is concerned is to recognise and facilitate all forms of purposeful human activity  –​ whether

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materially productive, socially reproductive, culturally creative or politically constructive –​as work. In Chapter 2 an attempt was made to capture the sense in which, for Marx, the word ‘work’ applies to whatever it is that human beings do in providing and caring for one another through their conscious and creative interaction or ‘metabolism’ with the world around them. Insofar as work is to be defined as purposeful activity, it requires consciousness. And insofar as it may be understood as distinctive species characteristic, it is a constitutive human need; an expression of being human. In order to establish the meaning of the work that human beings do, it is necessary fundamentally to question the currently dominant understanding of work as paid labour. ‘Productive’ work is a term that may be applied to human activity that is productive of the material means for the satisfaction of human needs. In the capitalist era, however, it is more usually applied to human activity that may not so much satisfy need, as generate exchange value; and that is therefore productive of profits and wealth (see discussion in Chapters 2 and 5). Work in this sense is synonymous with labour, and it is labour power that both creates and itself has exchange value, albeit that exchange value may not equate with use value or ‘usefulness’. We shall return in a moment to consider the ‘usefulness of work’, but the priority from an ethical perspective is the extent to which a worker may be valued as a human being. Hegel (1805–​06) argued that all work must have moral value. Not all forms of paid employment can be in every respect congenial or satisfying, but the value that attaches to work, however it is symbolised or represented, reflects the recognition accorded to the person who performs that work. Incorporating demands for the prohibition of slavery and forced labour, the modern human rights agenda provides that ‘Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work.’ (UDHR 1948, Article 23[1]‌), and this is currently reflected at the international level through the International Labour Organisation’s concept of ‘decent work’ (International Labour Organisation (ILO), 1999). But there is ample evidence that in labour markets around the world formal rights are not necessarily translated into substantive protection (H. Dean, 2016a; Doogan, 2009; Standing, 2009). Excepting egregious instances of ‘modern slavery’ (Global Slavery Index, 2018), it is the labour power of workers rather than workers themselves that is now bought and sold as a commodity, but it is not enough for workers to demand decent work if they are at a systemic disadvantage within the labour market or if they are excluded from formal labour markets. There is in most circumstances an imbalance of power between those who must sell their labour power in order to obtain the means of subsistence and those who seek to purchase it. That imbalance is amplified in the case of those with limited marketable skills, or who are from marginalised or vulnerable social groups. Employers may be persuaded voluntarily to provide work on just and favourable conditions to such groups –​for example to women with childcare responsibilities or to disabled people –​if indeed there is

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a demonstrable ‘business case’ for so doing; but if there is only a moral or ‘social’ case, legal regulation and/​or subsidy is generally required. What is more, there are parts of the global South (and significant pockets within the global North) where much of the economy operates informally (that is, without regulation) where work and the means of livelihood can be fundamentally precarious (ILO, 2019). Productive work may be satisfying and remunerative for the advantaged, but for many it is arduous and a humanist case has long been made for ‘idleness’; that people should have to engage in necessary productive work, for example, for no more than four hours a day, leaving them time for more pleasurable activity (Russell, 1932). Such a suggestion might appear to imply that human beings do not need to work, but from another perspective it underlines that all forms of useful human activity entail work. Marx, facetiously perhaps, envisioned a future society in which, freed from the systemised division of labour imposed by industrial capitalism, it would be possible for him ‘to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind’ (1845a: 12). But the point is that the boundary between ‘productive work’ and work as recreation depends on social context. The concept of ‘re-​creation’ as a human need in its own right also has something of a history (for example, Rowntree & Lavers, 1951), as does the contrast drawn by William Morris between ‘Useful Work’ and ‘Useless Toil’ (1888). Much creative work, even ‘amateur’ artistic endeavour, is more useful and more conducive to human well-being (Fischer, 1963) than the output of many a manufacturing enterprise. The unpaid work entailed in the maintenance and performance of amateur cultural and sporting activities can be a necessary part of social life and a vital component of a functioning community. This leads on to forms of work that are associated with caring and social reproduction, to which we shall turn again in our discussion of sociality. Some such work is paid human service provision, including education and healthcare, both of which are central in meeting human need. However, a very considerable amount of essential unpaid activity is involved in raising and caring for children, in tending to and caring for disabled adults or frail older people: work that meets many of the ‘thicker’ needs of human society (see discussion in Chapter 3) and which occurs within families and communities. Yet where such work is paid, it is often accorded a lowly status and is poorly remunerated. Finally in this section, there are forms of socially reproductive work, some of which is undertaken by paid professionals, though a great deal of which is ‘voluntary’: work of a charitable or political nature. Charitable work may revolve around religious or secular institutions and may have some degree of involvement in human service provision. Political work may revolve around local or national organisations or parties, and it represents the modern manifestation of the political engagement in public affairs and policy-​making processes envisaged by Aristotle as the human achievement of the citizens entitled to participate in debate in the

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ancient Athenian agora. It is the kind of work which bears on the ways in which human beings may consciously make their own history. Sociality The priority of a radical needs-​first ethic so far as ‘sociality’ is concerned is to recognise and validate the essential interdependence of human beings. In Chapter 2 an attempt was made to capture the sense in which Marx regarded human beings as autonomously conscious yet uniquely social; as beings defined by and through their social existence. To be fully human, humans need other humans to care for and about, and to care for and about them. This is the basis upon which we might interpret the functions of inclusive social security mechanisms; collective provision of, and/​or effective democratic control over, healthcare, housing provision and other human services. It is the basis upon which fundamentally to question dominant assumptions about care and caring for other people as being exclusively, or in the first instance, a private as opposed to a social concern. In Chapter 1 it was noted that Titmuss –​as one of the founders of academic social policy  –​defined need partly in terms of society’s will to survive as an organic whole and partly as an expression of people’s wish to assist each other. Titmuss, drawing on anthropological accounts of the social functions attributed to unilateral gift-​g iving practices in small-​scale pre-​modern human societies, suggested that in large and complex industrial societies, dominated by economic principles of bilateral exchange, the development of the modern welfare state preserved a mechanism by which people could give anonymously to others, including distant strangers (Titmuss, 1970: Ch. 16). In suggesting that individual human beings have a need to express altruism and that this serves a kind of organic social function, Titmuss’ contention is arguably not only teleological, but also romantically idealist. Nevertheless, it chimes with the more rigorously materialist argument that social interdependency is an essential characteristic of the human species as a whole; implying that caring is not a matter of innate inclination, but an immanent socially generated phenomenon. When Honneth (1995: Ch. 9) distinguished between love, solidarity and rights as the requirements for an ethical life, he identified different modes of mutual recognition; implying different levels of interdependency and different kinds of caring. Yet, reflecting on the moral effectiveness of the capitalist welfare state in relation, for example, to the relief of homelessness, Ignatieff expresses an apparent resentment that ‘the moral relations that pass between my income and the stranger at my door pass through the arteries of the state’ (1984: 141): his implication is that the faceless welfare state may negate, rather than embody, authentic caring; and that caring that is expressed, and assistance that is rendered, face-​to-​face is somehow more valuable than caring expressed by support for the rights of homeless strangers through the payment of taxes. Ignatieff, like Illich, who sought to return humanity to a state

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of ‘convivial austerity’ (1973; 1977), fears the prospect of a society in which, though needs may be met, we become a society of ‘moral strangers’. De Sousa Santos has suggested the possibility that the axiology (that is, the philosophy of value) associated with liberal progress and capitalist development might in time be superseded by an ‘axiology of care’ (2006: 31). The hope he expresses, therefore, is that value be accorded not to the proceeds of economic growth, but to care. All kinds of care are valuable. This resonates with a holistic conceptualisation of care as the need constituted through human sociality and with Tronto and Fisher’s demand … that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment … (Tronto, 1994: 103 –​paraphrasing a definition provided in Fisher and Tronto, 1990) Directly parallel with the concept of an axiology of care are more fully developed feminist theories of an ethic of care. These were briefly touched on in Chapter 3, when contrasting ‘thin’ formulations of autonomous ‘dignity’ with a ‘thick’ formulation of interdependent ‘caring’. A thick formulation of caring is compatible with the thick formulation of ‘humanity’ that was contrasted in Chapter 8 with thin formulations of liberal justice. The original ethic of care debate was very much concerned with competing moral voices of care on the one hand and of justice on the other; and with the gendered implications of the tensions between these moral voices (Gilligan, 1982). The caring that has long been performed in the privacy of the home is largely performed by women, while care that is publicly organised is largely controlled by men (even if performed by women) and is regarded as a secondary function to that of managing the economy (Barnes, 2012; Pascall, 1997; Tronto, 2013). Joan Tronto, however, proposes a form of caring that is not only ‘caring for’ or ‘caring about’, but ‘caring with’; a practice whereby citizens of a welfare state can be citizens of a caring democracy (2013: Ch. 7). An alternative way to express a process of transition to an axiology of care, a ‘caring democracy’ –​or to what Marian Barnes alludes to as a ‘care full’ policy agenda (2012: 118) –​would be to speak in terms of the radical humanisation of democracy and the realisation of human sociality; to articulate the holistic understanding of caring with practices of sharing. Dominant liberal discourse is framed in terms of principles of distribution; principles that espouse a utilitarian calculus of individual interests and proportionality, and which are founded, it may be argued, in fetishised notions of equivalence (see discussion in Chapter 8). The essence of human sociality lies in interdependence not equivalence; in the practice of care, not principles of exchange; in the articulation of needs, not the striking of bargains. In their metabolism with Nature and their communion with

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one another, human beings have to a greater or lesser extent shared resources necessary to their distinctively human existence in common. These, the commons, include material resources such as land, water, air and sources of energy; but also social or cultural resources, such as knowledge, languages, technologies and creative arts. The commons have of course been selectively monopolised, managed or marketised to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. Liberal individualist orthodoxies contend that in order to avert the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (the tendency for individual selfishness to result in the overexploitation of goods held in common –​see Hardin, 1968) this is inevitable, but recent debate has focused on how indeed it might be possible for collaborative communities sustainably to share resources held in common (Ostrom, 1990). That debate has spilled over into attempts to envision new forms of ‘social commons’ (Coote, 2017; Mestrum, 2014) extending to encompass, for example, the pooled financial resources entailed in social security or social protection systems and collectively provided health and social care. Mestrum uses the term ‘social commons’ explicitly to refer to ‘our shared and common needs and rights’ and to ‘that which is common to all people as members of society and to our common life on this planet’ (2014: 100 and 102). And yet welfare regimes premised on common need (as suggested in Chapters 6 and 8) may be as prone to paternalism and customary control as existing forms of social conservatism. Mestrum envisages, however, that social commons should be participatively built from the bottom-​up, but as with Tronto’s vision of ‘caring democracy’, the mechanisms to accomplish such a feat remain elusive. Nevertheless, the various suggestions outlined represent ways in which to ‘recast’ (cf Isin et al, 2008) the ontological foundations on which social citizenship is constructed, both locally and globally, and upon which a radical humanist approach could build. Such thinking might well inform practices by which better to realise human sociality and around which to constitute a needs-​first ethic that embraces caring as the basis of sharing. Historical development The overarching priority of a radical needs-​first ethic so far as historical development is concerned is to enable sustainable progress in expanding and fulfilling the radical character of human needs as a whole. In Chapter 2 an attempt was made to capture the sense in which, for Marx, the human essence –​that is, the distinctive character of human species being –​is the dynamic driver of history. The human species needs to progress in an existential rather than a teleological sense: it is defined by its capacity for development. And individual human beings are defined by the part they can play in the course of their everyday lives  –​consciously, actively and socially –​in the process of human development. Such an insight requires us fundamentally to question dominant assumptions about history being something

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that ‘just happens’. It is human beings who make it happen, and human beings who may benefit or suffer from the consequences, because from a humanist perspective ‘development’ may take adverse as well as beneficial forms. Chapter 8 touched upon the ambiguous notion of the right to development, although it is clear that that notion carries different meanings (H. Dean, 2015: Ch. 9; Uvin, 2004). Amartya Sen (1999) among others has equated development with the freedom of self-​determination, but this aspirational definition elides a fundamental distinction that may be drawn between hegemonic liberal-​ economistic evaluations of progress through wealth creation on the one hand and radical-​humanistic evaluations of progress through needs-​fulfilment on the other. Development may be regarded abstractly as an economic phenomenon, or concretely as a human phenomenon. Seeking on the basis of Marx’s critical philosophy –​and over a period that lasted from the 1930s to the 1980s –​to establish a ‘sociology of everyday life’, Henri Lefebvre observed how, as history unfolds, our everyday needs are subject to social modification. But he concluded that ‘The more needs a human being has, the more [s/​]he exists’ (2014: 181). Under capitalism, Lefebvre contended, the human needs of those who were disadvantaged by change were ‘lost’ or compromised:  they were repressed or perverted as the proletariat was alienated from its humanity and forced to struggle to achieve any fulfilment of human reality (cf discussion in Chapter 5). Lefebvre articulated an account focused not on historical changes in the economic relations of production but in processes of humanisation and dehumanisation (or, we might say, advantage and disadvantage) in the conditions of everyday life. In later writing he acknowledged the role of the Keynesian welfare state in sustaining capitalism, and he foresaw the implications of digital technologies and the information revolution for the substance of everyday life. And yet he insisted, ‘the mode of existence does not alter fundamentally’ (2014: 833). Any radical transformation of human society must be attempted not on the basis of further or faster economic growth or changes in political personnel, but in the quest for the qualitative development of everyday life and social relations. Lefebvre seems, therefore, to hint at the basis for a critical social policy and a radical humanist approach to social policy analysis, based on a needs-​first ethic. Adopting a needs-​first ethic entails new ways of thinking about historical development. To adopt Freire’s term, it requires a conscientized form of thinking that begins and is organically renewed through the bottom-​up perspectives of everyday life. It requires a revised form of commitment to ‘work’, that is to say the multitude of collaborative and creative activities by which we engage with the world around us –​with some very immediate implications for the existential challenge our species faces in repairing what Marx had foreseen as the ‘metabolic rift’ and the damage inflicted on the planet that sustains everyday life.2 It requires a thoroughgoing realisation of human sociality and an inversion of the immanent

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logic that across the world subordinates the role of care and caring and which drives processes of social disadvantage in everyday life. Historical development is the process by which human needs evolve; by which human lives change. We are a vulnerable highly interdependent species, but one that is uniquely defined not by our achievements, but our needs and our capacity purposefully to adapt those needs over time.

Conclusion/​Summary This concluding chapter has: • Provided a reprise of the preceding chapters, which have reviewed and analysed competing understandings of human need and the way those understandings relate to established approaches to social policy and social rights. At the same time several chapters have alluded to the possibility of radical humanist alternatives. • Considered the ways in which in their approach to addressing human need, capitalist welfare states have changed in response to global economic crises and ideological shifts. Such changes have resulted in greater pluralism and managerialism in the form of welfare provision; increasing austerity in the funding of welfare provision; contrasting counter-​trends such as ameliorative social investment strategies on the one hand, and populist welfare chauvinism on the other; and increasing scepticism or caution within the global South as to the wider relevance of existing welfare state models. • Reviewed some suggested alternative approaches to reforming the politics of need, including earlier attempts to draw on Marx’s theory of need; attempts that envisage wholesale participatory democratic reforms; pragmatic anti-​capitalist strategies that would seek to concert a range of existing reformist initiatives, or alternatively, ‘reflexively’ to prioritise demands for reform in instances where experiences of disadvantage are most urgent. • Suggested the adoption of a ‘needs-​first’ ethic as a radical humanist framing of the more pragmatic alternative approaches outlined in the previous section: an ethic that evaluates struggles over the naming and claiming of needs with reference to the essential constitutive human needs identified in Marx’s analysis of our species being. A needs-​first ethic would prioritise: ◊ the nourishment of human consciousness; requiring an expanded and democratised understanding of social learning processes and education; ◊ the facilitation of purposeful, caring and creative human activity; requiring an expanded understanding of what constitutes ‘work’; ◊ the validation of the essential interdependence or ‘sociality’ of human beings; requiring an expanded understanding of caring and sharing;

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◊ the enablement of historical development; requiring an expanded and expanding understanding of what constitutes conscious, active and social human progress.

Challenging questions 1 . What has politics got to do with human need? 2. How in present circumstances might a radical humanist conception of human need be relevant to a reframing of state welfare and social development?

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Notes Chapter 1 1 It must be acknowledged that ‘reformist’ and ‘progressive’ are, of course, notoriously slippery terms that may be applied to processes of change favoured from radically different ideological perspectives, but it is apposite in this context since it is perhaps the term most likely to be used by and applied to egalitarian social reformers. Chapter 2 1 The species appears always to have been divided by socially constructed relations of gender, a critical issue that will be addressed in Chapter 7. 2 The German word for spirit, geist, also means ‘mind’. 3 Elements of this account are drawn from H. Dean (2016b). Chapter 3 1 As sometimes mistakenly claimed (e.g. Dean, 2015:35)! Chapter 6 1 As will shortly be seen there are other models or schema with which the taxonomy in Figure 6.1 may be compared. It is not intended that the taxonomy should necessarily supersede these alternative models. The orientation of the diagram contained in Figure 6.1 is consistent with similar diagrams used in earlier work by the author and follows the convention established in the late Mary Douglas’ (1977) writings on cultural theory, with the dimension that approximates to ‘grid’ or structure represented vertically and the dimension approximating with ‘group’ or incorporation represented horizontally. 2 Distinguishing between morality and ethics inevitably courts confusion, if not controversy. We are concerned here with the distinction between mores (codes and customs) and ethos (doctrines and principles). By analogy, just as musicology entails critical reflection on music, so ethics entails critical reflection on morality. 3 In light of the provisions of the UN’s 1989 Universal Convention on the Rights of the Child it may be argued that children should be regarded as citizens in their own right, not merely as future citizens.

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Chapter 7 1 Social injustice and social disadvantage are not necessarily synonymous and, as signalled earlier, we shall be returning to discuss normative conceptions of justice and injustice in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 1 This is the most widely used translation from the Portuguese, ‘conscientização’, which has also been translated as ‘critical consciousness’ and ‘consciousness raising’. 2 A great deal more needs to be said about the priority that must now attach to confronting the imminent climate emergency and the threat of extinction that faces the human species if we do not. And a great deal more thought needs to be given as to how that might be achieved under the auspices of a needs-​first  ethic.

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Resources Key readings To suggest ‘further’ reading on the topic of human need means referring back to several of the texts already discussed. Here is a diverse selection of what might be regarded as key readings. On human need and social policy • Doyal, L. & Gough, I. (1991) A Theory of Human Need, Basingstoke: Macmillan. • Goodin, R. (1988) Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. • Hewitt, M. (1992) Welfare Ideology and Need: Developing Perspectives on the Welfare State, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. On related concepts and issues • Dean, H.  & Platt, L.  (eds) (2016) Social Advantage and Disadvantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Fraser, N. & Honneth, A. (2003) Redistribution or Recognition? London: Verso. • Held, D. & Kaya, A. (eds) (2007) Global Inequality, Cambridge: Polity. • Jordan, B. (2008) Welfare and Well-​Being: Social Value in Public Policy, Bristol: The Policy Press. • Layard, R. (2011) Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2nd ed). London: Penguin. • Lister, R. (2004) Poverty, Cambridge: Policy. • Márkus, G. (2014) Marxism & Anthropology: The Concept of ‘Human Essence’ in the Philosophy of Marx, NSW, Australia: modem-​Verlag (first published in 1978 by van Gorcum). • Max-​Neef, M. (1991) Human Scale Development: Conceptions, Applications and further Reflections, New York: The Apex Press. • Ryan, R. & Deci, E. (2017) Self-​Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development and Wellness, New York: Guilford Press. • Sen, A. (1985) Commodities and Capabilities, Amsterdam: Elsevier. On needs and rights • Dean, H. (2015) Social Rights and Human Welfare, Abingdon: Routledge.

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On needs and politics: alternative approaches • Illich, I. (1977) Towards a History of Needs, New York: Bantam/​Random  House. • Soper, K. (1981) On Human Needs, Brighton: Harvester. • Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Chapters 7 and 8).

Sources of interest Ideally, this section might have referred to key journals or research centres that focus on human need as a discreet topic. Significantly, however, there are none! Scholarship on human need is deeply though eclectically embedded in a vast spectrum of disciplinary sources, but remains largely neglected as a topic in its own right. That is something that this book has sought to address. There are, nevertheless, such sources as specialist encyclopaedia with entries on human need and, of course, there are internet sources that address issues directly relevant to human need. For example: Encyclopaedia entries • Brock, G. (2019). Needs in moral and political philosophy, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessible at https://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​needs/​ • Dover, M.  (2016). Human needs:  Overview, in C.  Franklin (Ed), The Encyclopedia of Social Work (Electronic ed, pp 1–​40). DOI: 10.1093/​acrefore/​ 9780199975839.013.554 Websites concerned with issues of poverty, inequality and disadvantage • in Britain: www.jrf.org.uk/​data • in Europe:  https://​ec.europa.eu/​eurostat/​web/​products-​datasets/​-​/​t2020_​ 50&lang=en • in US: https://​poverty.umich.edu/​about/​poverty-​facts/​ • globally: www.undp.org Data on social attitudes to need • in Britain: www.natcen.ac.uk/​ • globally: www.worldvaluessurvey.org

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197

Index A absolute need  xiii, 2 distinction from relative need  5–​7 academic social policy  1, 3, 7 definition  28 aesthetic needs  51, 52 aesthetic of consumption  76 affection  56 affiliation  58, 64 affluence  74–​5 Affluent Society  14 agency need  xiii, 27 agrarian revolution  103 Agricultural Revolution  14, 20 alienation  124–​5, 129 Althusser, Louis  67 American Declaration of Independence and Constitution (1776, 1787)  132 The Amsterdam Declaration on the Social Quality of Europe (1997)  37 ancient Athens  81 animalistic dehumanisation  125 Anthropocene era  16 anthropomorphism  22 anti-​intellectualism  162 Antony, L.  127–​8 Arendt, Hannah  23, 41, 159, 161 Aristotle  23, 29, 35–​7, 40, 81, 126, 127, 164 human fulfilment  126 Arnstein, S.  80 artificial instincts  14 artificial intelligence (AI)  16 artificial need  2 asocial conservatism  103–​5 asocial conservative/​moral-​authoritarian approaches  139 Assiter, A. and Noonan, J.  75 associative democracy  83 Asylum Law Referendum (2006, Switzerland)  83 ATD Fourth World  42 austerity  156 Australia  101

authentic happiness  52 authentic need  158 autistic economics  75 autonomous individual  53–​8 autonomy  53, 160 see also personal autonomy axiological need  xiii, 55 axiology of care  166

B background rights  133 Barnes et al  82 basic need  xiii, 2 definition  77–​8 Basic Needs Approach  77–​8, 84 Baudrillard, J.  76 Bauman, Zygmunt  19, 76 Becker, G.  101 bee societies  21–​2 belonging  51, 52 benefit rights  133 Bentham, Jeremy  30–​1, 133 Beveridgean national insurance schemes  107 Bhutan  33 Bill of Rights (1689)  132 biological/​physiological needs  6 birth rights  131 Bismarck, Otto von  106 black-​letter rights  133 bodily health  57 bodily integrity  57 bottom-​up theory  71, 131, 152 Bottomore, T.  139 Bradshaw, Jonathan  77–​9 Brasília Teimosa settlement  87–​8 Brock, Gillian  146 Bruni, L.  39 Budapest School  19 budget standards approach  117 Bull, Malcolm  66 Burchardt, Tania  34 Burston School strike  90 Butler, Judith  40

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C Callinicos, Alex  158 Cambridge House  84 Campbell, Tom  146–​7 capability approach  35, 55–​7, 63–​6 capitalism  15, 21, 67, 73–​4 commodity fetishism  74, 145 exchange value  73, 74 labour power  73–​4, 126, 141, 154, 163 law and  145 Marx’s critique of  126 negation of human fulfilment  126 social relations  152–​4 surplus value  74 use value  73 care  41, 43, 166 inequalities of power  44 care managers  105 care work  21 caregiving  43–​4 caring democracy  166, 167 Cartesian dualism  17, 51 categorical identities  124 categorical imperative  54 central capabilities  57–​8, 65, 66 charities  104 Charity Organisation Society (COS)  103, 104 childhood  123 China, welfare reform  142 choice  48 choice rights  133 Christian democracy  36 circumstantial need  xiii–​xiv, 2, 96–​7, 101, 108 citizenship rights  137, 137–​8 see also social citizenship civil rights  134, 138–​9 civil-​society activism  83 civilisations  14 claims-​based rights  131, 135 class  124, 156 social divisions  121 classic human individualist theories  48–​58 autonomous individual  53–​8 economic actor  48–​50

200

psychological being  50–​3 Classical Western philosophy  15 cognitive needs  51, 52 Cognitive Revolution  13–​14, 20 collectively provided services  3 commodity fetishism  74, 145 common need  xiv, 105–​7, 108 social insurance  106–​7 subsidiarity  106 traditions of noblesse oblige  106 common needs  97 communitarianism  17–​18, 36 comparative need  xiv, 79 competence  53 competition  48 Conditional Cash Transfers  31, 102 conditional rights  136–​7 conformist moral repertoire  97 conscientization  161, 162 consciousness  20, 160–​2 conspicuous consumption  74 constitutional need  2 constrained negotiation  144 consumer society  75–​6 consumerism  76 consumers  48–​9, 99 consumption  76 see also customs and consumption contingent cash transfers  107 Cox, R.  140 creation  56 critical autonomy  161 critical pedagogy  162 critical perspectives  62–​7 human individualist theory  62–​6 radical humanist approach  66–​7 critical reason  159, 161 cultural individualisation  39 cultural meanings  71–​3 cultural need  xiv, 2 cultural rights  134–​5 cultural turn  39–​40 culture of silence  161 customs and consumption  71–​6 consumer society  75–​6 cultural meanings  71–​3 illusion, falsity and wastefulness  73–​5

Index

D

E

daimon  29 Darwin, Charles  18 Das Kapital (Marx)  22 De Sousa Santos, B.  166 Deakin, Nicholas  155 Declaration of the Right to Development (1986)  135, 156 dehumanisation  124–​8, 129, 147 Delanty, G.  146 deliberation and choice  126 Delors, Jacques  37 demand, politics of  154–​9 democracy  81 democratic-​welfare-​capitalism  138 Deneulin, S. & Stewart, F.  64 deontological ethics  54 deontology  54 dependency  63–​4 dependency status  105 dependent citizens  107 derivative need  xiv, 2 Descartes, René  17, 18, 20, 51 desires  48, 49 development  168 see also right to development Devine, P.  157 difference, social constructions of  122–​3 digital technologies  16 dignity  41–​3 poverty and  42 direct democracy  83 disability  123 discrimination  103 discursive need  xiv, 61, 85–​7, 147 disutility  31 division of labour  22–​3 doctrinal rights  131, 135, 136 Douglas, M. and Ney, S.  39 Douglas, Mary  38, 86–​7, 94–​5, 95 Dover, Michael  125 Doyal, Len and Gough, Ian  60–​2, 125, 160 critical autonomy  161 Durkheim, Emile  124 dyshumanisation  125

Easterlin paradox  33, 38 Eastern philosophy  15 economic actor (homo oeconomicus)  48–​50 economic development  15 economic equilibrium  48 economic growth  33 social sustainability of  34 economic rights  134 economistic meanings/​approaches to need  4, 30, 94, 153 education  108 education indicators (MPI)  116 egalité  18, 100 Ellis, Brian  19 embodied self  51 emotions  57–​8 Engels, Frederick  18 Enlightenment  15, 132, 133 entitlement  137, 145 entitlement rights  133 entrepreneurial moral repertoire  96 entrepreneurialism  96 environment, control over  58 Epicureans  29 equal opportunities  102–​3 Equality and Human Rights Commission  103 equity  145 Esping-​Andersen, Gøsta  99, 100 ESRC Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group  38 ethic of care  166 ethnicity  123 eudaimonia  29–​30, 52 notions of well-​being  35–​40, 126 good life  35–​7 eudaimonic ethic  36 European Foundation on Social Quality  37, 95 European Union (EU)  37, 84, 141 exchange  14, 66 of commodities  145 exchange value  73, 74, 163 exclusion and misrecognition  120–​3, 129 existential need  xiv, 55 experiential need  xv exploitation  125–​6, 129

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Understanding Human Need

expressed need  xv, 78, 79 expression of need  85

F Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville)  22 Falk, R.  146 false need  xv, 2, 74 family and kinship networks  106 fascism  19 favelas  87–​8 felt need  xv, 78, 79 Feuerbach, L.  24 financial crisis (2008)  155–​6 first order agency  89 first wave human rights  133 Fisher, B. and Tronto, J.  166 forced labour  103 Forder, A.  80 Foucault, Michel  85–​6, 89 Frankfurt School  74 Fraser, Nancy  86, 87, 157, 158–​9 fraternité  18, 100 free market  48, 50 vs welfare state  59–​60 freedom  56 freedom rights  133 Freire, Paulo  161–​2, 168 French Declaration of Rights (1789)  132 Freud, Sigmund  51 friendship  126 future citizens  107–​8

G Galbraith, Kenneth  74–​5 Galtung, J.  95 Gasper, Des  1 Gattungsleben  23 Gemeinwesen  23 gender  122 inequality  123–​4 gender inequality  119 general will  17, 36 Geras, N.  67 Gergen, K.  39 Gini Index  118, 119 global justice  146

202

global market system  15 Global Social Democracy  146 Golden Age  15 good character  126 good/​ethical life  29, 35–​7 Goodin, Robert  59–​60, 79–​80 Gough et al  142 Gough, I. and McGregor, J.  28 Gramsci, Antonio  162 Granovetter, M.  113 greed is good belief  22 grid/​group analysis  87, 94–​5 Gross National Happiness (GNH)  33, 34 Gross National Income (GNI)  119, 120 Gross National Product (GNP)  33, 34

H Habermas, Jürgen  37–​8, 65, 86, 95 happiness  31, 32–​5, 52 happiness lens  33 Harari, Y.  13 Harris, J.  32 haves and have nots  114 Hayek, F.  50 health indicators (MPI)  116 health inequalities  118 hedonism  29 notions of well-​being  30–​5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  18, 23, 121, 133, 163 Held, David  146 Heller, A.  67 Hewitt, Martin  67, 86 hierarchy of human needs  51–​2 Higden, Kitty and Tom  90 higher need  xv, 2 Hirsch, F.  75 Hirst, P.  83 historical materialism  67 history  see human history Hobbes, Thomas  18, 30 Hobsbawm, E.  30–​1, 34 Hoggett, Paul  89 Holston, J.  87 homes  5 homo oeconomicus  96

Index

homo sapiens  13–​16, 25 see also human species Honneth, Axel  24, 165 human capital  57, 101–​2 human creativity  5 Human Development and Capability Association  57 Human Development Index (HDI)  119, 120 human essence  19, 20, 24–​5, 39 see also work human flourishing  146 human fulfilment  126 human history  13–​15 human individualist theory  62–​6 human injustice  125 human need  see need human purposes  25 human rights  see rights human scale development  55 human sociality  143–​4 human species  19–​25 biological differences  122 comparison with bee societies  21–​2 consciousness  20 historical development  24–​5 as political animals  23, 126 social constructions of difference  122–​3 sociality  23–​4 work  21–​3 see also homo sapiens human well-​being  see well-​being humanisms  17–​19 humanist feminism  127 humanity  145–​8 hunter-​gatherer societies  14 hyphenated society  138

I Ibn Khaldûn  71 ideal speech situation  86 identity  56 Ignatieff, Michael  135, 165–​6 Illich, Ivan  80, 161 imaginary needs  73–​4, 86 imagination  57 impairment  123 income  33 income distribution scale  117–​18 income inequality  119

independence  64 individual and collective, relationships between  40 individual need  152 individual possessions  133 individualistic ethic  64 industrial capitalism  126 Industrial Revolution  15, 18, 20, 21 inequality  114–​20, 117–​20, 128–​9, 140 between rich and poor countries  119 informal security regimes  142 infrapolitics  88–​9 Inglehart, R.  33 inherent need  xv, 2, 7, 60–​1 injustice  159 insecurity regimes  142 instrumental need  xv, 2 insurgent citizenship  87 insurgent claims making  87–​90, 157 intellect  162 intelligence  126 interdependency  64 intermediate need  xv, 61 International Association of Social Quality  37 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966)  156 International Labour Organisation (ILO)  37, 77–​8, 163 interpreted need  xvi, 2, 7 intersectionality  124 intrinsic need  2 invisible hand  48

J Jordan, B.  28, 34, 38, 89 justice  145–​8, 158

K Kant, Immanuel  35, 54, 147 Keynesian economics  141

L labour power  73–​4, 126, 141, 154, 163 Lacan, Jacques  86

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ladder of participation  80–​1 Langan, M.  77 language  14 law  145 Layard, Richard  34 Lederer, K.  72 Lefebvre, Henri  95, 168 legal rights  131 leisure  56 lesser eligibility  31, 86 Lewis, P.  143 liberal/​economistic approaches  139 liberal humanism  19 liberal-​individualist humanism  17, 30, 43 liberté  17–​18, 100 life  57 life expectancy  118 life-​first approach  160 life satisfaction (LS)  52 life value  157 limited sociality  144 Lister, Ruth  121 Locke, John  32 love  24, 51, 52

M MacGregor, J.  38 Magna Carta (1215)  132 managerialism  105 Mandeville, Dr Bernard  22 Marcuse, Herbert  74 Márkus, György  19, 23, 24 Marshall, T. H.  138–​9 post-​Marshallian concept of social rights  143–​4 Marshallian compromise  138–​40 critics of  140 Marx, Karl  18, 19, 39, 73, 75, 168 alienation  124–​5, 129 capitalism and human fulfilment  126 capitalist production  73–​4 consciousness  20 dehumanisation of capitalism  127 historical development  24 human need  66–​7, 127 imaginary needs  73–​4 radical humanism  127, 151, 152, 159

204

sociality  23 vision of society  66 work  21–​3, 164 Marxism  66–​7 Maslow, Abraham  51–​2 material inequality  117–​20 material need  xvi, 2 material rights  58 Max-​Neef, M.  55, 56 McMurty, J.  157 means-​tests/​testing  86, 100–​1 see also Speenhamland system mechanistic dehumanisation  125 mental ill-​health  34 mental need  xvi, 2 Mestrum, F.  167 Mikkola, Mari  127–​8, 147 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)  57 mind and body  51 misrecognition  120–​3, 129 Monetarist economics  141 Montesquieu  36 moral-​authoritarian approaches  94, 104 moral repertoires  86, 96 moral rights  17, 131 moralistic meanings of human need  4, 153 Morris, William  164 Moses  114 Multidimensional Poverty Indicator  115, 116–​17 Murray, Charles  139 mutual recognition  23–​4

N national efficiency  101, 102 National Insurance  107 natural goods  54 natural need  xvi, 2 necessaries  72–​3 need  1–​3 absolute/​relative distinction  5–​7 binary distinctions  2 civilisations and  72 competing understandings of  153 importance of  3–​7 Japanese language  72 measurement of  6

Index

naming and claiming of  7–​8 needs vs wants  59, 75 satisfaction of  55, 56 significance of  4–​5 social and discursive constructions  85–​7 theorised and practical conceptions of  94–​5 universal theory of  61, 62 vs want  59 welfare regimes and  98–​108 needing  28 needs-​first ethic  159–​69, 160–​2 historical development  167–​9 sociality  165–​7 work  162–​5 negative rights  133 negotiation  144 neo-​classical economics  31–​2 neo-​liberal economic thinking  59 neo-​liberalism  63 neo-​Marxists  61 New Poor Law (1834)  see Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) new public management  84 New Right  59, 139, 155 new social movements  61, 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich  18 noble savage  72 noblesse oblige  106 non-​derivative  need  2 non-​instrumental  need  2 non-​material  need  2 Noonan, Jeff  157–​8 normative need  xvi, 78, 79 noumenal self  51 Nussbaum, Martha  55, 57–​8, 64, 65, 66

O objective need  xvi, 2 oil crisis (1973)  155 ontological identities  124 ontological need  xvi, 28, 63, 124 ontological security  97 ontological vocation  162 ontology  54 oppression  125, 129 organic intellectuals  162

other species  58 out-​relief  104

P paid labour  163 Paine, Thomas  131 Palma Ratio  118, 119 Parish institutions  106 parity of participation  65 participation  56 participatory approaches to social policy  80–​5 consumerist  81 democratic  81 expression of need  85 particular need  xvi, 95–​6, 100–​3, 108 equal opportunities  102–​3 human capital  101–​2 means-​testing  100–​1 paternalistic meanings/​approaches to need  4, 35, 94, 153 personal autonomy  60, 61, 62 personal rights  136 personal social services  105 personhood  94, 95 Philia  40 physical health  61, 62 physical need  xvi–​xvii, 2 physical security  97 physical/​somatic  need  2 physiological need  2, 51, 52 Pigou, A.  48, 75, 101 Plato  51 play  58 pleasure  29 Pogge, Thomas  146 Polanyi, K.  113 political animals  23, 126 political rights  58, 134, 138 political work  164 politicisation of need  5 politics of human need  151–​70 needs-​first ethic  159–​69 consciousness  160–​2 historical development  167–​9 sociality  165–​7 work  162–​5 politics of demand  154–​9

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Understanding Human Need

alternative strategies  157–​9 changing politics of welfare  154–​7 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834)  103, 116 Poor Laws  86, 98, 100 Poor Rates  31 population  15–​16 positional goods  75 positive psychology movement  52 positive rights  133 post-​Enlightenment republicanism  36 post-​Marshallian concept of social rights  143–​4 post-​materialism  33 post-​structuralist tradition  85 Poulantzas, N.  139 poverty  42, 114–​20, 128–​9, 140, 146, 147 material absences and  114–​17 material core  121 measurements of  116–​17 relational-​symbolic aspects  121 unacceptable material inequality  117–​20 poverty line (UN)  117 poverty threshold  117 power  43 practical reason  58 pragmatic interpretations in social policy  77–​80 praxis  126 price  75 primary goods  54, 55 prisons  103–​4 procedural need  2 productive work  163, 164 productivist regimes  142 progressive social humanism  19 property ownership  133 property taxes  82 Proposition 13 (1978, California)  82 proselytisation of lifestyles  74, 76 protection  56 protective rights  137 psychological being  50–​3 psychological drives  6–​7 public participation initiatives  82 public realm  65 public reasoning  65 Pullman, Philip  29

206

Q QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years)  32 quality of life (QoL)  32, 52 monitoring and defining  37

R racialised difference  122 radical democrats  61 radical humanism  127, 151, 152, 159 radical humanist approach  66–​7 radical need  66 rational-​choice making  50 rationing  80 Rawls, John  35, 54–​5 re-​creation  164 real need  50, 86 recognition  23–​4, 121 recommodification  141 referenda  81–​3 reflexive justice  158–​9 reflexive negotiation  144 reformist moral repertoire  98 reformist solidaristic humanism  35 relatedness  53 relational goods  39 relational need  xvii relational self  40 relational well-​being  39, 40, 45, 118, 152 relationality  38–​40 relative need  xvii, 2 distinction from absolute need  5–​7 relaxation  5 Renaissance  15 representative democracy  81 resource distribution  114–​20 restitution  145 retirement  123 right to development  135, 156, 168 right to life  32 rights  17, 24, 54, 102–​3, 131–​2, 146, 147 language of  147–​8 origins of  132–​5 taxonomy  135–​7 see also Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)  49–​50 Room, Graham  154

Index

Roosevelt, Franklin D.  131 Rosser Index  32 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  17–​18, 36, 72 Ryan, R. and Deci, E.  52–​3

S safety  51, 52 Sahlins, M.  39, 114 Scientific Revolution  20 Scott, James  88–​9 Searle, Beverley  34 second generation human rights  134 second order agency  89 second wave human rights  133–​4 self-​actualization  51, 52 self-​alienation  20 self-​determination theory (SDT)  52–​3 self-​esteem  51, 52 self-​sufficiency  30, 31, 64 Seligman, Martin  52 selves-​in-​relationship  64 Sen, Amartya  35, 55–​7, 65, 66, 146, 147, 158, 168 senses  57 service user forums  82 Sevenhuijsen, Selma  40, 64 sexuality  122 shopping basket, cost of  117 sign value  76 Smith, Adam  22, 48, 72–​3, 101 social ageing  123 social animals  23 social assistance safety nets  100–​1 social capital  38 social casework  104 social citizenship  107 limitations of welfare citizenship  140–​3 Marshallian compromise  138–​40 post-​Marshallian concept of social rights  143–​4 reconceptualising  137–​45 social commons  167 social conservatism  36, 105–​6 social conservative/​paternalistic approaches  139 social constructions of difference  122–​3 social constructions of need  85–​7

social democracy  36, 107–​8, 140, 157 social disadvantage  113–​28, 125, 126 poverty and inequality  114–​20 material absences  114–​17 social divisions  120–​3 social-​ecological metabolism  21 social exclusion  129 social goods  54 social happiness  33 social inequality  118 social injustice  128 social insurance  36, 106–​7, 107 social investment strategies  156 social justice  35, 36, 54, 145 social liberal ideology  53 social liberalism  35, 36, 63, 101–​2, 131 social need  xvii, 78 social order  106 social policy  1, 2, 76–​87 Benthamite approach  31 emergence of  7 goals of  3 interventions  3 participatory approaches  80–​5 perspectives  58–​62 Doyal and Gough theory of human needs  60–​2 welfare state vs market  59–​60 pragmatic interpretations  77–​80 progressive social humanism  19 social and discursive constructions of need  85–​7 see also utilitarianism; welfarism social protection  36 Social Protection Floor  37 social quality  37–​8 definition  37 Social Question  98 social relations  152–​4 social relations of production  74 social reproduction  20, 21 social rights  134, 136, 138, 139, 152, 156 enforcement  142–​3 negotiation  144 post-​Marshallian concept of  143–​4 social scarcity  75 social standards  139 social structures  64

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Understanding Human Need

social value  28, 38 social welfare  155 social welfare provision, conditionality  102 social work  104 sociality  23–​4, 143–​4, 152, 165–​7 socially reformist meanings/​approaches to need  4, 94 socially reproductive work  164 sociogenic need  2 sociology of everyday life  168 Socratic tradition  29 solidaristic humanisms  17–​18, 35 solidaristic need  152 solidarity  24, 36 Soper, Kate  27, 157 Soviet Communism  67 space of capabilities  64, 65 species  see human species species consciousness  20 Speenhamland system  100, 115–​16 Spirit of the Gift  43 spiritual need  xvii, 2 squatting  87–​8 standard of living indicators (MPI)  116–​17 state capitalism  127 state welfare intervention  50 stoffvechsel (social-​ecological metabolism)  21 Stone Age  14 strong sociality  144 subjective need  xvii, 2 subjective well-​being (SWB)  52 subsidiarity  106 subsistence  56 substantive need  xvii supremacist humanism  18–​19 surplus value  74 survivalist moral repertoire  96–​7 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)  157 Switzerland  83 symbolic value  76 symbolic violence  121

T Tawney, R.  117 taxonomy of needs-​based approaches  93–​8 circumstantial needs  96–​7 common needs  97

208

particular needs  95–​6 universal needs  97–​8 taxonomy, social rights  144 Taylor, David  28, 39, 124 technical need  xvii, 32, 80 Temple, Archbishop William  154 thick moralities  27 thick need  xvii–​xviii, 2, 6, 95, 132, 152 distinction from thin need  27–​30 eudaimonic notions of well-​being  35–​40 good life  35–​7 social quality, social value and relationality  37–​40 thick/​substantive conceptions of rights  133 thin/​formal conception of rights  133 thin moralities  27, 30 thin need  xviii, 2, 6, 95, 132, 152 distinction from thick need  27–​30 hedonic notions of well-​being  30–​5 happiness  32–​5 utilitarianism to welfarism  30–​2 Thin, Neil  33 thinking and being  20 thinking individual  18 third generation of human rights  135 Third Way  102, 104 thought  57 Titmuss, Richard  3, 30, 154, 165 top-​down theory  47, 131, 152 Townsend, P.  74, 117 Toynbee Hall  84 traditional intellectuals  162 Tragedy of the Commons  167 Tronto, Joan  166 true need  xviii, 2 Turner, Bryan  134

U UN Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights  156 understanding  56 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)  41, 133, 138, 156, 163 universal elementary education  106 universal need  xviii, 97–​8, 108 universal suffrage  81 unmet need  79–​80, 113–​28

Index

unpaid work  164 use value  73 useful work  164 useless toil  164 utilitarianism  30–​1, 34, 96, 139 utility  38

V value  73, 145–​6 and human need  158 Veblen, T.  74 Victorian workhouses  103–​4 violence  16 virtue  126 viscerogenic need  2 voluntary work  164 Vygotsky, L.  23, 161

W wage labour  21, 65, 74 Walzer, Michael  27 wants  48, 49, 59–​60, 72 vs needs  59, 75 Washington Consensus  36–​7, 38, 101 We-​relation  40 wealth  115 weapons of the weak  88–​9 WEF Global Gender Inequality Index  119, 124 welfare  28, 155 changing politics of  154–​7 welfare citizenship, limitations of  140–​3 enforcement of social rights  142–​3 global South, ill-​suited to  142 paid employment  142 poverty and inequality  140 reconstitution of  140–​1 reducing costs of  141

state apparatus  142 welfare economics  31–​2, 75–​6 welfare regimes  98–​108 asocial conservatism  103–​5 liberalism  100–​3 social conservatism  105–​6 social democracy  107–​8 taxonomy  99–​100 welfare rights  138 welfare state(s)  7, 36, 99, 139 crisis of  59 global crises  155 idea of  154–​5 individual responsibility  155 vs market  59–​60 politics of welfare  155 welfare-​to-​work  104–​5 welfarism  31–​2 well-​being  28, 126 definition  28 eudaimonic notions of  35–​40 hedonic notions of  30–​5 see also happiness White, Sarah  40 Wilkinson, Richard  118 Williams, Patricia  147–​8 work  5, 21–​3, 162–​5 usefulness of  163 work-​first approach  105 work status  104 worker citizens  107 workfare state  104 workhouses  31, 101, 103–​4 working classes  106 World Bank  84, 141 World Health Organization (WHO)  37 World Trade Organisation (WTO)  141

Y youth  123

209

2nd edition

“In this new edition, Hartley Dean again demonstrates his mastery of the subject and his ability to analyse complex issues concerning the nature of human need and its relationship with rights and welfare. His book will be the standard reference work on human need for many years to come.” James Midgley, University of California “A truly comprehensive account of human need and an original value-based argument for a new politics of need – indispensable reading across the social sciences.” David Taylor, University of Brighton “This book is a welcome addition to the literature and a very useful resource for teaching that fills an important gap.” Gillian Brock, University of Auckland “Venturing beyond a standard revision, this second edition of Dean’s textbook develops a novel radical humanist vision of need and outlines a ‘needs-first’ ethic. Of interest to a wider audience beyond social policy.” Ian Gough, the London School of Economics and Political Science

overview of human need as a key concept in the social sciences. Taking an approach encompassing both the global North and South, this accessible and engaging book models existing practical and theoretical approaches to human need while also proposing a radical alternative. Incorporating crucial current debates and illustrations, the author explores: • distinctions between different types and levels of need; • how different approaches are reflected in different sorts of policy goals; • debates about the relationship between needs, rights and welfare; • contested thinking about needs in relation to caring, disadvantage and humanity. Fully revised and updated, this new edition pays due regard to the shifting nature of welfare ideologies and welfare regimes. Offering essential insights for students of social policy, it will also be of interest to other social science disciplines, policy makers and political activists. Hartley Dean is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

ISBN 978-1-4473-4198-7

@policypress @policypress PolicyPress policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

9 781447 341987

Hartley Dean

This second edition of a widely respected textbook is one of the few resources available to provide an

Understanding human need

Understanding welfare: Social issues, policy and practice series

Hartley Dean

Understanding human need 2nd edition