Thinking collectively is a book about the meaning, implications and value of collectivism in social policy. There are many aspects of public policy that need to be understood in collectivist terms. The most obvious examples are probably defence, foreign policy or cultural development – if they are not collective, they are incomprehensible. In social policy, however, the decisions tend to be finer and more difficult. Issues like public health, provision for unemployment and education can be dealt with in many ways. There are choices to be made between individual and collective approaches, and a balance to be struck, but the options are rarely mutually exclusive.

The distinctions between individualism and collectivism are rarely as clearly defined as we might like. Some writers try to clarify core principles with invented examples, game theory, thought experiments and ‘crazy cases’. There may be some value in this as an intellectual exercise, but the crazier the example, the less certain it is that the principles can be applied. All the examples in this book are drawn from life; most come from social policy. Policies typically develop through a complex range of issues and negotiations, and examples drawn from experience are unlikely ever to conform neatly and precisely to the demands of theory. That also means that the lines cannot be drawn as clearly and cleanly as they might be in a thought experiment. There is no easy correspondence between theory and practice; there are policies which take individual approaches to deal with collective problems, and collective approaches to deal with individual ones. Most examples are referred to briefly. Longer examples add depth to the argument, but they also have the potential to lead away from it. They have been presented in Boxes so as not to disrupt the flow.

The issues discussed in Thinking collectively are far from being new, but I have been surprised to find that they have not been addressed more explicitly, or more directly, in the literature. This book is unusual, for example, in considering collectivism as a variety of approaches, rather than a unifying doctrine. The leading academic analyses of collectivism are individualistic; some contemporary criticisms of social perspectives are based on the same kind of overwrought misapprehension that greeted Durkheim's work more than a century ago.