Lord Beveridge

1930 - 1945 Intellectial construction and dilemma

1942
Lord Beveridge

William Henry Beveridge (1879-1963) was a student at the School in 1903-04 and its Director from 1919-37. He was an economist and a social worker, and his time at Toynbee Hall had brought him into contact with many involved at the School, including the Webbs. His directorship at LSE has often been described as a second foundation of the School. It was a period of tremendous growth for the School, and Beveridge's directorship was responsible for the School's recognition during the 1930s as one of the world's leading social science centres. He was a central figure in the sheltering of the 'refugee scholars' displaced by Nazi oppression in the 1930s: the Academic Assistance Council was established as a result of his initiative. He resigned the directorship in 1937, taking up the Mastership of University College, Oxford before joining the government in 1940.

Outside academia, Beveridge's career was diverse. He had been a leader writer for the Morning Post from 1905, where he wrote on social problems, before joining the civil service in 1908 and entering the Board of Trade. He was the director of labour exchanges from 1909-16, and he was a leading authority on unemployment and social security, authoring Unemployment: a Problem of Industry in 1909 (revised 1930), a pioneering study of the labour market's complexity. He helped draw up the 1909 Labour Exchanges Act and part ii of the 1911 National Insurance Act, the latter introducing unemployment insurance for two and a quarter million workers in the heavy industries. In 1944 he became the Liberal MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed, and after the loss of his seat in 1945 he served as a Liberal peer in the House of Lords.

His most famous contribution to society is the Beveridge Report (officially, the Social Insurance and Allied Services Report) of 1942, the basis of the 1945-51 Labour Government's legislation program for social reform. Beveridge saw full employment as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 Beveridge Report, and Full Employment in a Free Society (1944) expressed how this goal might be gained. Alternative measures for achieving it included Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society. He was critical of shortcomings in social legislation after 1945, and his Voluntary Action (1948) defended the role of the private sector in the provision of social welfare. In later years Beveridge devoted himself to a history of prices, the first volume of which, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, had been published in 1939. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1937.