ABSTRACT
Being primarily concerned with the prospect of political power, technocrats and Keynesian socialists naturally had an eye to electoral considerations when fashioning policies to complement their egalitarian doctrines. At one remove from the political process, qualitative socialists were less inhibited by such mattersalthough the distance did not prove an advantage. The two dominant versions of qualitative socialism in the 1950s both failed, in their different ways, to overcome the gap between policy and vision that had plagued Cole and Tawney in the 1930s. This in itself was not surprising but the effects were highly detrimental for qualitative socialist thought. By the early 1960s the Socialist Commentary group, suffering a severe lack of confidence in the efficacy of its beliefs, virtually conceded the end of its onceambitious ethical vision. The Titmuss group, on the other hand, salvaged elements of the qualitative ideal, even managing to endow it with new policy proposals, but at some cost. The group’s overriding concern with pension arrangements and other aspects of social policy narrowed the traditional scope of qualitative socialism to a concern about the welfare state.
