Let me start this article on the valuation basis of social policy by a negative assertion contradicting the title. To stress the subjectivity of the valuation process, I deliberately use the word ‘valuations’ and avoid the term ‘values’ that is so popular in all social science – except in the combination ‘value-premises’ when certain valuations have been defined and made explicit for use in research.

I have borrowed this term from Richard Crossman. When he wrote his contribution to the New Fabian Essays in 1952 he took stock of the present state of socialism, as the original Fabians had done in 1889. He hoped to discover ‘a philosophy of Socialism’ with life in it. But he failed. An obvious place to look for it was in the Welfare State, as it had emerged from the hands of the post-war Labour government. But the Welfare State, he decided, was not socialist; it was ‘the climax of a long process, in the course of which capitalism had been civilised and to a large extent reconciled with democracy’. Later on he referred to the product of this process as ‘welfare capitalism’. He ought to have called it ‘democratic-welfare-capitalism’ because, as I shall argue, democracy deserves to have a position as a third party of independent status, not just to be taken for granted.

Ideology and public policy are so intimately related that they may only with difficulty be seen separately. This essay attempts to view one kind of ideology, American family values, and predict the manner in which they will affect public policy and be altered by public policy. Whatever its intrinsic hazards, prediction for the last quarter of the century affords relative safety for a few years anyway. The term ‘family values’ is used broadly here to encompass objectives that are professed for families in the United States as well as patterns of family structure and activity to which, by practising them, we show attachment. I begin with a brief review and commentary upon the relationship between family values and public policy to date, concluded with some comments on the role that social scientists and reformers might play. Discussion of the future follows, with one further prescription.

I have the honour to address you today in this lecture founded to cherish the memory of L. T. Hobhouse, who was the first professor of sociology in this University and in these islands. He devoted his life to extending the study of social development within the framework of those evolutionary theories which had contained so much of Victorian social thought. He discerned a ‘self-conscious evolution of humanity’, found ‘therein a meaning and an element of purpose for the historical process which has led up to it’, and concluded that the ‘slowly wrought out dominance of mind in things is the central fact of evolution’. His fundamental thesis was that humanity had for the first time reached the stage of self-direction. Hobhouse's approach to sociology was itself a protest against sterile separatism either among the several social sciences or between them and the world of everyday affairs. He was a main contributor in his day to the principles of constructive liberalism and a leading exponent of the ideal of democratic equality. He sought for himself a unity of academic theory and social practice through his lifelong commitments as a journalist and commentator as well as an active participant in the work of Trade Boards and other institutions of the labour market. I do not therefore feel that I should apologize for taking as the theme of this memorial lecture present-day anxieties, enthusiasms and confusions about sexual conduct in their bearing upon Hobhouse's ideals of the liberation of the individual, of self-direction and of democratic equality.