Understanding Human Need

✍ Scribed by Hartley Dean

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 234
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This second edition of a widely respected textbook is one of the few resources available to provide an overview of human need, as a key concept in the social sciences. Taking an approach encompassing both global North and South, this accessible and engaging book models existing practical and theoretical approaches to human need while also proposing a radical alternative. Incorporating crucial current debates and illustrations, the author explores: • distinctions between different types and levels of need; • how different approaches are reflected in different sorts of policy goals; • debates about the relationship between needs, rights and welfare; • contested thinking about needs in relation to caring, disadvantage and humanity. Fully revised and updated, this new edition pays due regard to the shifting nature of welfare ideologies and welfare regimes. Offering essential insights for students of social policy, it will also be of interest to other social science disciplines, policy makers and political activists.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
Half-title
Series
Understanding: Human Need
Copyright page
Dedication
Table of contents
Detailed contents
List of figures, tables and boxes
Acknowledgments
Preface to the second edition
1 Introduction
Why is need important?
The significance of needs
The absolute/ relative distinction
The naming and claiming of human need
Outline of the book
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
Part One Understandings and concepts
2 The needs of humanity
Human history
Humanisms
Species characteristics
Consciousness
Work
Sociality
Historical development
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
3 The thin and the thick of need and needing
The distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’
Thin needs and hedonic notions of well-being
From utilitarianism to welfarism
The study of happiness
Thick needs and eudaimonic notions of well-being
Philosophical underpinnings: in search of the good life
Social quality, social value and relationality
Dignity and caring
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
4 Needs in theory
Classic human individualist theories
The economic actor (homo œconomicus)
The psychological being
The autonomous individual
Doyal and Gough
Critiquing human individualist theory
A radical humanist approach?
Social policy perspectives
Critical perspectives
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
5 Needs in practice
Customs and consumption
Cultural meanings
Illusion, falsity and wastefulness
Consumer society
Social policy perspectives
Pragmatic interpretations
Participatory approaches
Social and discursive constructions of need
Insurgent claims making
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
6 Human need and social policy
A taxonomy of needs-based approaches
Particular needs
Circumstantial needs
Common needs
Universal needs
Human needs and welfare ‘regimes’
Promoting particularity in practice: liberalism
Responding to circumstance in practice: asocial conservatism
Safeguarding the common in practice: social conservatism
Realising the universal in practice: social democracy
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
Part Two Implications and debates
7 Unmet needs and social disadvantage
Poverty and inequality: the distribution and accumulation of material resources
Poverty and material absences
Unacceptable material inequality
Exclusion and misrecognition: the construction and demarcation of social divisions
Dehumanisation: processes of alienation, oppression and exploitation
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
8 Articulating needs as rights
Rights-based approaches
The origins of rights
A taxonomy of rights-based approaches
Reconceptualising social citizenship
The Marshallian compromise
The limitations of welfare citizenship
A post-Marshallian concept of social rights
Justice or humanity?
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
9 The politics of human need
Reprise
A different politics of demand
The changing politics of welfare
Alternative strategies
A needs-first ethic
Consciousness
Work
Sociality
Historical development
Conclusion/Summary
Challenging questions
Notes
Resources
Key readings
Sources of interest
References
Index
Back Cover