Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley

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      These suggested meanings are not necessarily systematic. They amount to no more than caricatures of broad, sometimes principled and often complex arguments as to the nature of the human condition. You are unlikely ever to meet anybody who subscribes consistently to just one of these meanings in the terms just portrayed. Our purpose for the moment is to provide not necessarily an accurate description of what particular individuals, commentators or policy makers think or say, so much as a clearer understanding of the complexity of the issues. In practice these meanings are seldom, if ever, applied in complete isolation from one another. They tend to be muddled together. Approaches are combined – often unthinkingly but sometimes with subtlety – in contradictory or complicated ways. This will be illustrated in the chapters that follow.

      These meanings will be enlarged upon and explored, while introducing different radically humanist meanings of need. People in fact need more than just jobs. Certainly they need the means to obtain a livelihood, but this should not necessarily depend on wages. It is possible, in some parts of the world, to obtain livelihoods without recourse to a cash economy through subsistence farming; or, in others, to sustain oneself as a lone parent or informal carer through social security benefits. Nonetheless, people most certainly need to be meaningfully active in ‘work’ – regardless of whether it is paid – because this is part of what defines our humanity. ‘Work’ might entail labour, but it might also entail caring, studying, artistic endeavour or all kinds of purposeful and creative activity. And human creativity demands not just skills but also the development and expression of personality (in its literal sense).

      People need more than just a place to live. Certainly they need to be appropriately sheltered from the elements, but space and place are important. People need comfortable homes and a healthy, sustainable environment. People need more than just time to relax. Certainly they need enough time to rest, but more particularly they need time to realise their own creativity; to play as well as rest. People most definitely need somebody to love, and somebody to love and care for them in return. Our humanity, it will be argued, depends on the manner of our interconnectedness and interdependency with others.

      The absolute/relative distinction

      A key debate that has driven a great deal of this complexity concerns a distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ conceptions of need. Is it possible to define what human beings need in absolute terms, or is human need always socially or culturally relative? And if human need is always relative, is there any point in seeking to define it? This has been a critical question for social policy (Doyal & Gough, 1991: Part I). The period of welfare state retrenchment that began in the global North from the 1970s onwards (M. Powell & Hewitt, 2002) has been associated by some writers with a ‘politicisation of need’ (Langan, 1998: 13–21). Towards the end of the last century arguments about the relativity of human need had developed to the point that the very concept of need had among many policy makers become increasingly discredited.

      The absolute/relative distinction is intimately caught up with issues of poverty, deprivation and inequality. A person may be said to be absolutely poor if she is deprived of the necessities of life itself. She may be said to be relatively poor if she is deprived of whatever she might need in order to participate in the life of the society to which she belongs. Villagers in a drought-stricken region of sub-Saharan Africa need food and water. But do relatively deprived families living in inner-city public-sector housing developments in the global North really need state-of-the-art-televisions and high-end smartphones, simply because some, or perhaps many, of their neighbours seem to have them? As living standards rise around the world, will human needs continue indefinitely to expand? These are questions to which we shall be returning later in the book. For now, however, it is suggested that the absolute/relative distinction – whether applied to poverty or to need – contains two underlying distinctions. One distinction relates to the extent of human need or needing – thinking of ‘to need’ as a verb and as a distinctive component of all human feeling and experience. The other distinction relates to the essential or identifiable characteristics of human needs – thinking of ‘need’ as a noun and as a thing to be named or defined.

      Insofar as the distinction between absolute and relative needs is concerned with the extent of human needing – both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense, this raises questions of measurability on the one hand and philosophy on the other. How much do we need and how far do our needs extend? Should human need be minimally or optimally satisfied? Is it enough that we should be able minimally to survive or is it important that we should be allowed, or even encouraged, so far as possible to flourish (Ignatieff, 1984: Introduction)? Another way of thinking about this – and one we shall be adopting – is to distinguish between thin needing and thick needing (Drover & Kerans, 1993: 11–13; I. Fraser, 1998; and see Walzer, 1994). The terms are, of course, metaphorical, and one of the analogies that has been used to explain them relates to the difference between a thin insipid soup that, though it may be nutritious and wholesome, is not as thoroughly satisfying as a thick rich soup – skilfully or lovingly made – which appeals to our sense of taste and enjoyment. It is a distinction between what might respectively be called minimalist and expansive interpretations of need and of needing.

      When it comes to the characteristics of need, human beings are simultaneously both biological and social creatures. We have biological or physiological needs on the one hand, but we have socially derived needs on the other. In practice, because we are embodied social beings (K. Ellis & Dean, 2000), it can be difficult to draw a line that distinguishes between these two kinds of need. But one element of the absolute/relative distinction is a distinction between physical sufficiency and social acceptability. We have bodily needs, but our needs have social meaning and significance. Psychological ‘drives’, for example, may be subject to cultural ‘taboos’. We can’t escape from our bodies, but some of the things that define us as human derive from our social context; from our inter-relationships and interdependency with other human beings; from the dynamics of human history and development. Therefore, the second distinction we shall draw is between, on the one hand, needs that are conceptually or theoretically defined – from the ‘top-down’ – as inherent to the human person and, on the other, needs that may be experienced or practically observed or interpreted – from the ‘bottom-up’ – in the course of everyday lives and processes.

      The naming and claiming of human need

      Social policies are concerned with the ways in which human needs are met. And academic social policy is concerned with the critical analysis of that continuing process. What we call social policy emerged during the 20th century with the development of capitalist welfare states in the global North (T. H. Marshall, 1950), albeit that there have been different kinds of welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990) that have reflected different and sometimes conflicting approaches and priorities in terms of their underlying understandings of human need.

      It is clear, however, that throughout the world – even within the welfare states of the global North – needs have been going unmet, and theorists and practitioners alike have sought better to understand and address the processes that fuel the enduring systemic disadvantages that remain evident, most especially in parts of the global South. However, the concept of human need has remained relatively under-theorised. Attention has been paid to the role of rights-based approaches to the alleviation of poverty and the prevention of disadvantage, albeit that connections between understandings of human need and the framing of social rights have by and СКАЧАТЬ