Читать книгу Understanding Human Need 2e - Dean Hartley - Страница 12

Preface to the second edition

The first edition of Understanding Human Need was written at a time when I was grappling with the ambiguities and inadequacies of concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘well-being’ and in the hope that by focussing on something as fundamental as human need it would be possible to pin down more precisely the central focus of the academic subject in which I work, namely Social Policy. The result was a book which developed an integrative model by which to categorise the main approaches to human need and demonstrate how they are reflected in different sorts of policy goals. It concluded with some discussion of the relationship between human needs and social rights and the politics of needs: themes I went on further to explore in later work.

In this second edition, I return partly to fill some of the gaps that I left in the earlier edition, to bring my account up to date, to correct or clarify certain elements of my argument and to improve some of my explanations. But more fundamentally, I want to make a more explicit theoretical contribution regarding the essential nature of human need. I want to re-address questions concerning ‘humanity’ and need; regarding the constitutive essence of the human species and the essential normative or ethical principles associated with human being. To do this, I have had to restructure the book quite significantly. As human beings we struggle to define our needs but the suggestion with which this book now concludes is that it is by our needs that human beings are defined and define themselves. In this sense, we are what we need. Though it retains elements of the first edition, this is now a very different and, I hope, more interesting book. And, while it has been written partly with social policy students in mind, it now has relevance, I believe, to a very much wider audience.