Teri Chettiar, The Intimate State: How Emotional Life Became Political in Welfare-State Britain, (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2023;  328 pp.)

Teri Chettiar's The Intimate State offers a compelling, richly documented account of how emotional life became central to political governance in Britain after World War II. Departing from conventional welfare-state histories and liberalization narratives of the ‘sexual revolution,’ Chettiar argues that the post-war period was shaped by a deep preoccupation with intimate relationality – both developmental and therapeutic in its orientation. Across seven empirically rich chapters, she shows how the human sciences, therapeutic professions and welfare institutions together recast close emotional relationships as infrastructures of national health. Drawing on archives from psychiatric clinics, social work services, popular media and government debates, Chettiar demonstrates how intimate life became an object of expert knowledge, institutional intervention and moral evaluation.

At the heart of her argument is the idea that the post-war welfare state was organized not only around material redistribution but also through a revaluation of emotional life. In Britain between 1945 and 1979, she argues, close personal relationships – particularly within the family – came to be regarded as the foundation of democratic citizenship and social stability. These relationships were not merely private but were shaped and regulated through therapeutic institutions and psychological discourse. Chettiar calls this novel formation the ‘intimate state’, a political project in which emotional well-being became both the goal and the medium of governance in post-war Britain.

Chapter 1 focuses on psychiatric reform during WWII, when psychiatrists and psychoanalysts rethought the authoritarian family in light of the perceived emotional pathologies of fascism. Drawing on therapeutic community models and critiques of the ‘authoritarian personality’, they argued that emotionally mature individuals – raised in environments of care and mutual love – were more