Idealist thought, social policy and the rediscovery of informal care

Recent work in the history of welfare has suggested a need to reconsider the status of some conceptual frameworks within sociology and social policy studies regarding the meaning of ‘social welfare’ and the ‘welfare state’. In this context, the present article argues in particular that the marked upswing of interest in informal care in the UK beginning in the 1970s reflected, at least in part, a reaction, itself not so far adequately understood, to some features of the work of Richard Titmuss and ‘traditional social administration’, work which, on examination, reveals a distinctive ‘idealist’ core, unsympathetic to research into familial patterns of caring. Similarities with ‘classic’ British idealism, broadly defined, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries are reviewed. This idealist thought emerges too as unresponsive to informal care, even though contemporary non‐idealist thought had discussed it. The article concludes that the (unacknowledged) persistence and influence of idealist modes of social thought diverted attention away from informal care; informal care was in fact not ‘discovered’ in the 1970s, it was rediscovered as idealist preconceptions about the nature of ‘real’ welfare were discarded. The sense of ‘discovery’ reflected prevailing and dubious historigraphical interpretations of the meaning of ‘social welfare’ and the status of the (‘classic’) ‘welfare state’.