It will be helpful to say something at the outset about how this book came to be written. Some time ago I had formed an interest in Herbert Spencer, and soon realised that his ideas on how liberty, the enforcement of justice, and the growth of altruism in general might advance welfare, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, were not at all well understood in historical and theoretical studies of social policy. A reluctance to take Spencer seriously on such matters was to a degree excusable. His name was principally associated with the ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘social Darwinism’ and ‘individualism’, as it happens far from adequate or straightforward representations. None resonated positively in orthodox social policy circles.

However, unfamiliarity with Spencer concealed his innovative attention to the reality and potential of informal care, understood as ‘private beneficence’. This state of affairs was ironic: by the late 1970s academics and policy makers involved in social policy and social work studies were, in a volte-face after customarily shunning informal care, waking up to it as a phenomenon needing research, and careful consideration in the framing of policies. My own research into informal care at the time (Cecil, Offer and St Leger, 1987) coupled with an interest in the analysis of Spencer's thought, led me to reflect on what sort of connection there might be between the neglect of Spencer and of informal care for so long in social policy discourse. It was clear at the time that liberal philosophies of welfare provision had not been in favour – the subject of social policy (or social administration as it was then more often known) – had apparently jettisoned them as inappropriate, or proven failures. It was also clear that taking seriously people's needs and preferences as they themselves defined them was to embrace liberal perspectives and pluralist values, not top-down command and unitary values (a perspective developed in two forthright articles by Antony Flew, 1983 and 1985 and which I surveyed in Social workers, the community and social interaction (Offer, 1999b)). Perhaps in some way the blossoming preoccupation with informal care in social policy studies was evidence of a ‘paradigm shift’, of an underlying disciplinary mind-set losing its hold.