• DOI:10.1093/TCBH/HWS009
• Corpus ID: 145267344

The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2011 The ‘Big Society’ and the ‘Big State’: Creative Tension or Crowding Out?

@article{Thane2012TheBP,
  title={The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2011 The ‘Big Society’ and the ‘Big State’: Creative Tension or Crowding Out?},
  author={Pat Thane},
  journal={Twentieth Century British History},
  year={2012},
  volume={23},
  pages={408-429}
}

• P. Thane
• Published 1 September 2012
• Economics
• Twentieth Century British History

Recent political discourse about the ‘Big Society’ has stimulated thinking among historians and others about the relationship between state and societal action concerning social welfare and other important areas of daily life, past and present. Implicit, sometimes explicit, in the Big Society rhetoric is the assumption that voluntary/philanthropic/community/non-governmental/third sector (the terminology is itself as diverse as this large terrain) action to promote social improvement has declined from some past golden age, normally located in the nineteenth century. That the growth of the ‘Big Welfare State’ has been a major agent of that decline, and the ‘Big State’ and the ‘Big Society’ are and always have been at odds, as state welfare grew through the twentieth century, ‘crowding out’ non-governmental action. This declinist discourse itself has a history that has persistently been invoked by critics of the welfare state. It has been reinforced by academic writing. In the USA and Britain, Robert Putnam made a big impact with Bowling Alone, describing the apparent decline in social bonds in US communities in recent times, though his more recent work calls this interpretation in