Society’s Volunteers

In his 1948 work, Voluntary Action: a Report on the Methods of Social Advance, William Beveridge warned of the potential for an expanded postwar state ‘to destroy the freedom and spirit of conscience’. In particular, he feared that the state’s expansion during and immediately after the Second World War could marginalize a rich voluntary tradition. While supportive of much of the ‘social service state’, Beveridge was concerned about the diminished significance of the bodies that had commissioned Voluntary Action, the friendly societies. He offered an ominous, albeit indeterminate, warning about the state’s capacity to eclipse ordinary citizens’ organized activities on behalf of their fellow citizens.

This anxiety has been a recurring theme of politicians and public commentators ever since Beveridge’s day, right up to Prime Minister David Cameron’s critique of the centralizing tendencies of Labour governments, to which he counterposed his own (now largely defunct) ‘Big Society’ programme. According to Cameron, Labour’s expanded welfarism had atomized citizens, leading to a ‘Broken Britain’. The ‘Big Society’ was the putative cure to this social breakdown.

In fact the decades between Beveridge’s report and Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ had seen plenty of voluntary action. The Wolfenden Committee on Voluntary Organizations reported in 1978 that ‘for the most part we have been impressed with the health and vitality of the voluntary sector’.¹ Surveying the sector in the 1990s for his Meeting the Challenge of Change (1996), Nicholas Deakin likewise found that voluntary action was still robust, and that the greatest challenge facing the sector was not diminished significance or vitality but rather the risk that the sector’s independence would shrink as it developed closer state ties.

The collection of essays reviewed here, edited by Deakin and Melanie Oppenheimer, amply demonstrate the persistence of a voluntary impulse whose continuing energy has been matched by its adaptability. The overviews of voluntary action in Britain (Pat Thane), Australia (Paul Smyth) and Canada (Peter Elson) demonstrate the dynamism of voluntary agencies within their specific national contexts. Measuring civic engagement over half a century is difficult, but the evidence suggests that any decline narrative is far from compelling. The data compiled by the University of Birmingham’s ‘NGOs in Britain’ project points to the persistence of voluntary action within Britain throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This can be seen in a particularly modern form through the prevalence of the modern non-governmental organization (NGO).²

Oppenheimer and Deakin see their volume as offering ‘lessons on which civil society can draw to address the problems of the twenty-first century’. A key lesson is the need to heed Beveridge’s warnings that voluntary actors must ‘preserve independence while seeking constructive relationships’ with the state. Certainly this is a major challenge. Voluntary agencies have relied increasingly on the state especially since the 1980s, and this has created significant difficulties as well as opportunities. All the contributors to this volume emphasize this issue, but it would have been useful to be told more about how these difficulties have emerged over time. If lessons are to be learnt, we need to know which policies and approaches have been most effective in letting voluntary agencies remain autonomous while working effectively with the state.

That all the contributors here find something to say about Beveridge’s thoughts on voluntary action reflects the wide-ranging content of his 1948 report. The volume’s first five chapters focus on Beveridge’s reasons for writing Voluntary Action, describing it variously as a product of his deep commitment to mixed-economy welfare provision (Jose Harris); as the result of his personal experience of providing relief for academics escaping Nazi Germany (Nicholas Deakin); as an idealized vision of the work of the friendly societies (Daniel Weinbren); and as a response to the fate of the voluntary associations during the Second World War and the early years of the ‘social service state’ (Frank Prochaska). All these chapters are very interesting, but they do not speak to...