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Sociologists seldom get a good press, except where they don’t need it.

Michael Young was a great exception. He was an innovating intellectual whose brain was happy to put theory and practicality in the same compartment, and many thousands of people who had never heard of his fifties book The Rise of the Meritocracy will know of the Consumers’ Association and the Open University, and perhaps be thankful for them, but not attach his name to either body. Yet without him they might not have existed. He was a public figure who liked not to be very public; a force for change who achieved much more than most of the ministers and mandarins to whom he often had to sell an idea and whose most precious possession has always been to say yea and nay.

Lord Young of Dartington, as he became in 1978, was a thinker who never tucked himself away. When Cambridge University asked him to set up its sociology course, having come late to the notion, he thought the dons too rigid in their thinking and backed out quickly. He preferred to be free of confining institutions, a feeling that probably gripped him for life when as a teenager he came under the influence of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. The couple had set up Dartington Hall in Devon as a radical school, intended unashamedly for a select band of children of free thinkers in the intelligentsia who would be given their heads and encouraged to contemplate utopia. It was an inspiration. Thanks to Dorothy Elmhirst, Young found himself having dinner with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House and being encouraged to argue. It was his fifth school, his parents having broken up, and it became his own utopia. The urge to think differently never left him.

Politically, Young was one of the most important people in post-war Britain, though from a back room. Excused military service because of chronic asthma, he worked in an early think-tank – it had the austere name Political and Economic Planning – which gave him his first experience of bringing together people of ideas and policymakers. This experience produced a document that, by any standards, was of huge importance. At the age of 29 he wrote – more or less single-handedly – the Labour Party manifesto for the 1945 general election. After Clement Atlee’s victory it became the template for a government that had a chance to be radical in the post-war era, transforming the economic model of the country, establishing the National Health Service, and outlining a social consensus that held sway across the parties for the next generation.

However, Young didn’t take to front-line politics at that stage, for by the start of the fifties he had already decided that the Labour Party he helped to bring to power had run out of ideas. He left his job, went to the London School of Economics, and made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. He moved to Bethnal Green in the East End of London, an area battered by the blitz and racked with poverty, a world that despite his interest in public policy he had never seen. Politicians, he thought, had lost touch with these people: ‘The local councillors heard the complaints,’ he said, ‘but did nothing about them because they’d been captured by officials.’

Characteristically, his first reaction was to think. He set up what he called the Institute of Community Studies. Working with Peter Willmott, he began to study the East End and write about the people, trying to get a feel for the barriers that were preventing them from having better lives, and pondering the social changes that might be needed. One of his first books, Family and Kinship in East London, published in 1957, made a shattering noise. It argued against the planners’ lust for sweeping urban redevelopment and tried to bring the values of family and shared experience to bear on social policy. Over the next few years his ideas excited, irritated and disturbed policymakers and he became a voice of social reform in the manner of some of the Victorians he greatly admired, like the philanthropic reformers Joseph Rowntree and Charles Booth. This didn’t sit well with some fellow academics in his field, who found his faith in that kind of individual action a little quaint, but he couldn’t have cared less. There was a streak of romanticism in him. He was the kind of man who never said ‘why?’, but usually ‘why not?’

Throughout the fifties he challenged conventional thinking which he thought had let people down, and pursued his own form of egalitarianism. Even many of those who wouldn’t go all the way with him – on comprehensive education, for example – found his ideas inspiring. The Rise of the Meritocracy, written with Willmott, brought a new word into the language, sold half a million copies and was, he hoped, a warning against what might happen to a society that was too careful in favouring the strong over the weak.

But in the year before his death, 2001, Young confessed that he had been sadly disappointed by the book – not because of any of its ideas, but because people had long forgotten that it was a satire, a caution. Instead, he was forced to lament the fact that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was now using the word ‘meritocracy’ with approval, as a benign object of policy. ‘I do wish he wouldn’t,’ he said. He recalled that the book – which he assumed Tony Blair had never read – was a warning about what might have happened seventy-five years on if society insisted on dividing people into sheep and goats. He wrote, ‘My imaginary author, an ardent apostle of meritocracy, said shortly before the revolution, that “No longer is it so necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes.”’

The fire still burned into the new century, when the Young Foundation for social research, successor to his first think-tank, was still based in the East End. But there was more to Young than the ideas that he’d developed after the war. He also became a man of action.

Looking back, it may seem extraordinary that the notion of consumer power was so slow to develop. Mass marketing had grown fast, and American techniques were revolutionizing advertising, which from the mid-twentieth century had had television to give it more power. Where was the individual going to turn for help when it was needed? Young knew that something was required, and explained in one famous lecture how public clocks had been replaced by watches, ice factories by fridges, cinema by television, and how the car had become a powerful individual weapon. You didn’t have to be a sociologist to work out that people who bought things – consumers, they were starting to be called – needed help, not just in making informed choices when they were being tempted by the burgeoning advertising industry, but to cope with dodgy goods and the many fake claims made about them. The power was all on one side and the balance had to be redressed. The difference Young made wasn’t just that he spotted that danger: he did something about it.

The result was the Consumers’ Association, founded in 1956. The idea was that members, who paid a subscription, would pool their knowledge and their energy to fight for information about goods and services, and about the choices they could make. It would give them power. As Young once put it, ‘Class based on production is giving way to status based on consumption as the centre for social gravity.’ He’d got the idea from the American Consumers’ Union set up in the thirties during the Great Depression, and he decided that the time had come in Britain.

Along with the Consumers’ Association came its magazine, Which?, still published today. The first edition road-tested aspirins and kettles: there was apparently a rather large number of dangerous kettles on the market and people needed to be warned against them. Around the Consumers’ Association Young set up a network of all kinds of advisory bodies and services. These included advice on funerals, a helpline that was the forerunner of NHS Direct, even a language line to provide help for professionals dealing with people for whom English was a second language, an idea well ahead of its day. The political philosopher Noel Annan said he reminded him of the Greek hero Cadmus, whose deeds were the object of wonder: ‘Whatever field Michael Young tilled, he sowed dragons’ teeth and armed men seemed to spring from the soil to form an organization and correct the abuses or stimulate the virtues he had discovered.’

The Consumers’ Association grew more quickly than anyone had imagined. It thought it might get 3,000 subscribers to Which? in the first year (the magazine was published from a converted garage in Bethnal Green) but within four months there were 100,000 and the organization continued to grow. Young’s argument was that people wanted to make rational choices, so why not help them? In its way it was a revolution. For the first time in an age of mass marketing when people were being told ‘You’ve never had it so good’ because of what they could buy, the argument was made that individuals had to be championed, given redress when they were wronged, and encouraged to resist the road-roller of ever-bigger manufacturers using the power of advertising to have their way. He saw it as a culture war.

Much of this zeal he attributed to the energy that had flowed from the Festival of Britain – the cultural opening of the fifties and the event intended to mark the transition from wartime austerity to something different and more hopeful. The Festival championed new architecture and invention, artistic endeavour and innovation of all kinds, and designers, especially, had felt the beginning of a new era. Young epitomized the spirit of those who were terrified at the prospect of a stuffy, unchanging society which – in his view – tolerated the sore of urban poverty and resisted fresh ways of thinking.

His story is remarkable because he managed to keep up the pace, moving on, experimenting. He never tired of poking fun at an establishment, and, abandoning his old Labour loyalty, in the early eighties he became a founder of the SDP. At the same time – such a rare gift of commitment in an innovator – he stuck with the ideas that had worked and lent them all the support he could.

But it was in the sixties that he made what became maybe his lasting contribution, the one that Harold Wilson, three times Prime Minister, said was the proudest thing he had done in power: the Open University. Young couldn’t see why, with the ever-present TV set, students couldn’t work and study from home. There were sceptics – even Iain Macleod, the formidable and far-sighted Conservative, described it as ‘blithering nonsense’. But within a few years, after a shaky start on a quagmire of a campus at Milton Keynes, the Open University was turning out thousands of graduates every year and has since become the world’s leading online university, its teaching standards in many disciplines rated more highly than those in some quadrangled, much older seats of learning. Two generations of graduates have done what otherwise might have been impossible for them.

Maybe that is Young’s legacy, but there is more. He was imaginative enough in the eighties, for example, to propose, after President Reagan announced his ‘star wars’ defence programme, the establishment of a Martian colony that he hoped would eventually declare independence from earth. He was going to simulate conditions on Mars in the building on London’s South Bank that would become Tate Modern, and persuade thirty people to be filmed in a kind of serious embryonic Big Brother. It never happened, but he always wondered what it would have been like.

The fifties are often lazily caricatured as the dull, do-nothing decade. Michael Young’s career belies it, and the evidence is still there.