It has seemed to me and many others that Britain is now entering a political phase in which the post-war consensus around matters of social welfare is being dissolved in favour of a new set of assumptions which emphasize the individual's recourse to law or to legally-embodied appeal procedures, even at the expense of more collective rights which were previously enshrined (imperfectly, it is true, but still definitely) in State-sponsored welfare provision. As I present it here, the implication is made of a fundamental antagonism, perhaps, and more certainly of a serious and unmistakable competition, between the claims of a legally-inspired and individualistic approach and the aspirations of medicine and psychiatry which are grounded in the availability of collective provisions: collective in a double sense, as being both the product of politically organized popular demand and also the expression of structured interventions by the State and other social agencies aligned with the State. It is this dualism between medicine and law, or at a more rarefied level between an individualism founded on contractual civil relations and a collectivism rooted in the institutions of mass democracy and public spending, which I feel needs most justification in argument, and which clearly lacks such justification in the remarks I shall offer here.