(Excerpt from Freedom Under Planning
At the same time all...)
Excerpt from Freedom Under Planning
At the same time all freedoms have a common quality the quality, in fact, of freedom. If the discussion is to be practical and realistic, it is necessary to have a working notion of what this particular quality is. For the purpose of. This book, which is severely practical, freedom may be simply defined as ability to do what you want. Behind every word in that definition there lurks, admittedly, a mass of philosophic doubts and-subtleties. In practice one must turn a blind eye to these, and build on the assump tion that in ordinary life most people recognize the dif ference between ability to do what they want, and inability to do this. Lack' Of freedom, at all events, is unmistakable enough. Most of us know only too well the peculiar emotion Of frustration by which denial or depriva tion of freedom is accompanied.
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Testament for Social Science (RLE Social Theory): An Essay in the Application of Scientific Method to Human Problems (Routledge Library Editions: Social Theory)
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The contrast between mans amazing ability to manipulat...)
The contrast between mans amazing ability to manipulate his world and his pitiful incompetence in managing his own affairs is now as commonplace as it is tragic. It is by rigorous devotion to scientific method that we have made our conquests over the material environment; it is obvious that this method is not normally applied to the field of relations of human beings, individual and collective. These are conducted in a quite different way, governed by a medley of primitive impulses set in a framework of a traditional morality that varies from place to place and age to age. In these matters science plays little part; yet more than a century has passed since Auguste Comte said that the rational reform of society must be brought about by the application of scientific method to social problems. It is, therefore, the first purpose of this essay to ask how far social problems might be tackled by the methods of science.
Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abinger was a British social scientist.
Background
She was born in 1897 in Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. She had two older brothers. The daughter of James Adam, a classical scholar and senior tutor of Emmanuel College. Her mother taught at Girton, the college founded for women who were, until the 19206, excluded from full membership of the university.
Her father died in 1907 when she was only 10 and the younger of her two brothers was killed in World War I in 1916.
Education
Mrs. Adam taught her daughter at home until she was nearly 14, after which she went first to the Perse School in Cambridge and then to Girton.
Wootton moved from the study of classics to that of economics, and such was her enthusiasm that she is known to have annotated every line of her copy of Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics. In her examinations she achieved a first class with a special mark of distinction; owing to the rules of the university she was not, as a woman, entitled to be formally awarded the degree of B. A. Her early training in classics gave her an unusually fine command of language, to be demonstrated in her later writings, and her sound foundation in economics gave an equally firm foundation to her work in applied social science.
Career
She embarked at a relatively early age upon a teaching career, which continued until 1952 when she resigned her professorial post. Wootton's talents as a teacher were formidable, although her lectures at Cambridge had to be listed under the name of a man for whom she would, by arrangement, act as a substitute.
She left Cambridge in 1922 to become a research officer for the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party though continuing to teach part time at Westfield and Bedford Colleges. In 1926 she decided to move into the field of adult education and became principal of Morley College for Working Men and Women. She was not to stay there for very long before she was offered and accepted the post of director of tutorial studies for the University of London, a branch of the university which was also concerned with adult education.
In 1944 she moved to Bedford College where she became head of the Department of Economics, Sociology and Social Studies, having the title of professor conferred upon her four years later. But Bedford, then a women's college, was not an easy place in which a social scientist might flourish and in the course of an internecine squabble over the allocation of a government grant-in which she was the principal victim-Wootton resigned and applied for a research fellowship with the Nuffield Foundation. The fruits of this fellowship were to be found in a major work, Social Science and Social Pathology (1959). Nine years earlier she had published Testament for Social Science: An Essay in the Application of Scientific Method to Human Problems, in which she set out her essentially positivistic belief that only through the application of scientific method could human problems in the area of economic and social planning have any serious hope of solution. It was an idealistic work that inspired many of the rising generation.
The Social Foundations of Wage Policy appeared in 1955; it was a polemical analysis of the structure of wages and salaries in British society, and in a seminar she summarized it in the aphorism, "The more you earn the less hard you have to work to get it. " It contained some strange echoes of her earlier work, Lament for Economics, which had appeared in 1938. Wootton performed many other public services. She was a magistrate and specialized in the juvenile courts, a member of the University Grants Committee, a governor of the BBC, and the first chairman of the Countryside Commission. Among sociologists she left little if any mark, but among the analysts of social policy, not least in the criminal justice field, her influence was considerable if not always immediately apparent.
Wootton's work, which addresses issues in social economics, planning, and criminal justice policy, is representative of the British tradition of social democratic thought in the period 1935 to 1970. Her autobiographical writing is a useful source of information for the period 1920-1970 in which she was active in academic and public life.
Always a supporter of the Labour Party, she became one of the first of the new Life Peers in 1958 with the title of the Baroness Wootton of Abinger and was to become a deputy speaker in the House of Lords. Curiously, when the Wilson government was formed after the Labour election victory of 1964 she was never given any office but continued to serve as a member of the Advisory Council on the Penal System, chairing notable subcommittees on the subjects of noncustodial penalties (subsequently incorporated into legislation) and on cannabis (whose recommendations were rejected by government).
Views
She was a supporter of utilitarianism. She supported an "Incurable Patients Bill" in the 1970s which would have allowed doctor-assisted suicide. Her views on abortion which were pro-life but without any religious basis led her to be removed from her position as Vice-President of the British Humanist Association.
Connections
At the age of 20, having begun to read classics, she married Jack Wootton, a young army officer whom she had met when he was a research student at Trinity College. Their honeymoon lasted less than two days as he was recalled to his regiment in France at short notice; five weeks later he was killed in action.
In 1935 Wootton married George Wright, a colleague in adult education and London government. Despite Wright's infidelity, the couple remained married until his death, as a result of cancer, in 1964. The couple had no children.