Michael Young: An Innovative Social Entrepreneur

Abstract

Michael Young described the construction of the Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto as ‘Beveridge plus Keynes plus socialism’. Although Young is perhaps most famous for his major contribution to this seminal document, his was an uneasy relationship with a Labour Party of highly centralised and large-scale state enterprise. The chapter assesses Michael Young’s contribution to thinking about alternatives to Labour’s more traditionally state-socialist concerns. It charts his progress from within Labour’s Research Department in the late 1940s and subsequent contributions to social democratic revisionism, through a long career of social entrepreneurship, to the Social Democratic Party and then back to New Labour. It focuses on Michael Young’s attempts to revive marginalised themes of Labour’s traditions in non-statist, decentralist, participatory forms of public intervention.