ABSTRACT
Between the local communities and the international systems discussed in the last chapter there intervenes the national state. One of Harry Hopkins’ key signifiers of modernity was an increase in state intervention, initially sanctioned by war but continuing in peacetime and accepted as a necessary and legitimate activity by the post-war Labour government and the Conservative governments of the 1950s. It was through the state that the modern citizen could be created and controlled and it was through the state’s bureaucracy that the excessively dynamic forces of modernity could be channelled. The state was entrusted not only with the welfare of its citizens – the cradle-to-grave protection of the welfare state – but also with harnessing the expertise of the scientists, architects, designers and planners who would develop the modern Britain. In the process, the state needed its own experts, civil servants and government officials of all kinds, some of them in newly developing professions, such as sociologists, psychologists and social workers. For Hopkins, one contradictory feature of the modern world is that the streamlined, driving force of science and technology is paralleled by and requires an increase in the bureaucracy and paperwork associated with planning. The emphasis could no longer be on the individual but only on the ‘complementing specialisms’ (Hopkins: 160) that had to be fitted together like cogs in a wheel and that needed systems to enable them to function. This emphasis on impersonal bureaucracy was a feature not only of the state and its own civil service but also of the institutions associated with it – the police, the education system and the law, for instance.
