The Gift Relationship has long been acknowledged as one of the classic texts on social policy. Honored by the New York Times as one of the ten most important books of the year when it first appeared in 1970, Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship is even more topical now in an age of AIDS and changing health care policy. A seemingly straightforward comparative study of blood donating in the United States and Britain, the book elegantly raises profound economic, political, and philosophical questions. Titmuss contrasts the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is largely in the hands of for-profit enterprises and shows how a nonmarket system based on altruism is more effective than one that treats human blood as another commodity.

Richard M. Titmuss was a professor of social administration at the London School of Economics form 1950 until his death in 1973. He had an international reputation as an uncompromising analyst of contemporary social policy and as an expert on the welfare state.