Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley

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      thick need: This term has been accorded particular significance for the purposes of this book and is used to refer to needs that are optimally defined and that include the things that may be necessary for a person truly to flourish and to share a good life.

      thin need: This term has been accorded particular significance for the purposes of this book and is used to refer to needs that are minimally defined but which include the things that are necessary for a person, with dignity, to achieve pleasure and avoid pain.

      true need: Opposite of ‘false’ need. But what is true, of course, depends on one’s point of view, so the term may be used equally to apply, for example, to ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ need.

      universal need: A term accorded a very particular meaning in this book and which refers to need that is ‘thickly’ conceived but theorised to be inherent to the human subject. For policy purposes, people’s needs here stem from their humanity and what is required for human fulfilment. They are defined or negotiated by and through the way people depend upon and participate with one another. Confusingly, perhaps, it can sometimes also be used as a synonym for ‘basic’ need, not quite in the sense referred to earlier, but as a way of referring to the elemental needs that every human being has.

       Acknowledgements

      When writing a book one incurs debts to a great many colleagues, friends and family members. Special mention in this instance must go to those who read and commented on complete or partial drafts of this and/or the preceding edition of this book; who in correspondence or conversation have pointed me to sources, ideas or information of direct relevance; who in the course of unrelated collaborations have inflected my thinking in new directions; or who have offered recognition or encouragement for the project as it unfolded. These include: Orly Benjamin, Irene Bucelli, Tania Burchardt, Ulrike Davy, Michael Dover, Tony Fitzpatrick, Ian Gough, Bill Jordan, Mary Langan, Lutz Leisering, Ruth Lister, Lucinda Platt, Camila Souza and David Taylor. I have also benefited from discussions with the many students who over the past 15 years studied my course on Social Rights and Human Welfare at the LSE. I am grateful to Catherine Gray, of Policy Press – University of Bristol; and to Pam Dean not only for the initial proofreading of typescripts, but for forbearance, support and much else besides. However, insofar as the book exhibits errors and many weaknesses, these are wholly my responsibility: none of these good people are in any way to blame.

       Preface to the second edition

      The first edition of Understanding Human Need was written at a time when I was grappling with the ambiguities and inadequacies of concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘well-being’ and in the hope that by focussing on something as fundamental as human need it would be possible to pin down more precisely the central focus of the academic subject in which I work, namely Social Policy. The result was a book which developed an integrative model by which to categorise the main approaches to human need and demonstrate how they are reflected in different sorts of policy goals. It concluded with some discussion of the relationship between human needs and social rights and the politics of needs: themes I went on further to explore in later work.

      In this second edition, I return partly to fill some of the gaps that I left in the earlier edition, to bring my account up to date, to correct or clarify certain elements of my argument and to improve some of my explanations. But more fundamentally, I want to make a more explicit theoretical contribution regarding the essential nature of human need. I want to re-address questions concerning ‘humanity’ and need; regarding the constitutive essence of the human species and the essential normative or ethical principles associated with human being. To do this, I have had to restructure the book quite significantly. As human beings we struggle to define our needs but the suggestion with which this book now concludes is that it is by our needs that human beings are defined and define themselves. In this sense, we are what we need. Though it retains elements of the first edition, this is now a very different and, I hope, more interesting book. And, while it has been written partly with social policy students in mind, it now has relevance, I believe, to a very much wider audience.

       1

       Introduction

      This chapter will introduce the reader to the contested nature of human needs, but then:

      •explain the importance of human need by:

      ◊illustrating how concepts of need figure in central, albeit diverse, ways in our everyday lives and everyday discourse;

      ◊critically reinterpreting the vital yet contested distinction between absolute need and relative need that continues to dominate and constrain social scientific analysis and debate.

      •outline the contents of the rest of this book.

      This chapter sets out to explain that ‘need’, though it is a central term in social policy, has proved to be an elusive concept. It will demonstrate how understandings of human need may be reflected not only through social policies but also in wider interpretations – whether commonplace or philosophical – of the ‘human condition’ (Arendt, 1958).

      Competing concepts of human need, whether express or implied, are present within all the social sciences. Academic social policy, as an inter- and multidisciplinary subject, draws from across the social sciences including sociology, economics, politics and elements of psychology, philosophy and much else besides. Need, it has been said, is a concept that is ‘central to social policy making’ (Erskine, 2002: 158). Unfortunately, need is also a concept that is interpreted in a mind-boggling variety of ways. Des Gasper has described the proceedings of an academic workshop convened in the 1990s as part of a research project on human needs and wants as follows:

      … it became evident that the participants – psychologists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists – held to no consistent usage of ‘need’, as individuals, not only across disciplines. Yet most of us had read and thought about needs since the 1960s or 1970s. We jumped between different usages almost from one sentence to the next: between … more basic needs versus satisfiers; and verbs versus nouns – and also between needs as explanatory forces and factors, needs as (pre)requisites, and needs as particular sorts of moral priority claims. (Gasper, 2007: 54)

      

      There is a virtually inexhaustible supply of binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of human need, many of which we shall encounter in the course of this book (see Table 1.1 and also the select glossary at the beginning of the book). Many of these distinctions overlap or coincide with each other. Some may be more helpful than others. To pursue them all in any depth would be as exhausting for the reader as for the author. The literature on human need is also replete with a similarly inexhaustible supply of thought experiments and anecdotal vignettes with which to illustrate a variety of philosophical conundrums. They will be used sparingly, if at all, because they can lead readers (and this author) to a sense of despair and inadequacy since nobody has been clever enough to solve every conundrum.

      Table 1.1: Binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of need

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