LORD YOUNG OF DARTINGTON: Lord Young of Dartington, who died on January 14th aged 86, was a man of many parts: educator, author, academic, consumer advocate, policymaker, political activist - and rebel.
Over and above these were two other roles, inventor and entrepreneur, which made him a unique figure in British 20th-century social reform.
The new paths he hacked out in education, consumer rights and health services have helped millions of people. Some of his ideas - like the Open University and the Consumers' Association - have become world famous, but there were numerous other projects.
The majority of his projects were simple and practical, meeting an obvious need: brain trains, on which commuters teach each other; Linkage, bringing together older people without grandchildren, and young people without grandparents; Language Line, a telephone interpreting service for doctors and ethnic groups; health advice lines and a hospital waiting list guide.
His energy was phenomenal. So was his never-flagging ability to discover new needs and come up with new institutions, even in the most stressful situations - like the College of Health, a pressure group for patients, which emerged from his first spell in hospital for cancer in 1982.
Michael Young was born in Manchester. His father was an Australian violinist turned music critic, his mother a bohemian painter and actor. His early years were spent in Melbourne, but he returned to England at eight, shortly before his parents' marriage broke up.
By the age of 14, he had been through four schools, where he was "hunted and harried by rules, regulations and corporal punishment". Relief came in 1929 with his transfer to Dartington Hall, a new progressive school in Devon for 25 children of the intelligentsia.
By the start of the second World War, he had picked up an economics degree at London University and qualified as a barrister at Gray's Inn. By the end of the war - asthma blocked him from military service - he had served five years as director of Political and Economic Planning, a think-tank that brought together policymakers and practitioners, and become director of research for the Labour Party. He was 29.
His readiness to challenge sacred cows from the inside did not take long to surface. In 1947, he was almost sacked for criticising the Trades Union Congress in a pamphlet on the need to restrain wages. In the same year he called for a social science research council, and became its first chairman when he eventually persuaded Tony Crosland to set it up 17 years later. He left his Labour research job in 1950 "because the party had run out of ideas".
In 1952, he returned to the London School of Economics and switched his Ph.D research from a political voting study to housing conditions in London's East End. He was shocked at the extent to which local Labour leaders had lost touch with their communities.
This led him to set up, in 1952, the Institute of Community Studies, the base from which so many of his later ideas were launched. From the beginning, he was concerned with giving people more say, improving the rights of housing tenants and NHS patients, and fostering neighbourhood councils "to reduce the scale of government".
The institute was an ideal base for such an inventive man. It was never burdened by a large bureaucracy, although it did require him to search endlessly for funds. One of his first studies, Family And Kinship In East London (1957), which he wrote with Peter Willmott, forced planners to reassess the fashion for sweeping urban redevelopment.
Within academic sociology, he was criticised as romantic, unscientific and too ready to draw sweeping conclusions. None of this perturbed a man who put more faith in the methods of Victorian reformers than in post-war sociological techniques. His approach was to listen to ordinary people, put down in lucid prose the problems they set out, and produce practical solutions.
Michael Young started a dawn university on Anglia Television, which became the prototype for the Open University, launched by Harold Wilson in 1964. In between these initiatives, he started the National Extension College, providing distance learning courses for thousands of British students, and, in 1972, the International Extension College for third-world students. A decade later, he joined forces with Peter Laslett to launch the British version of the University of the Third Age.
Like all good entrepreneurs, he picked up ideas from a wide variety of sources. For example, he first thought of the Consumers' Association on reading a report about American consumer unions before the war - although he had to wait until 1957 to launch its British version.
Michael Young's only period of affluence was thanks to another iconoclastic essay, an attack on equal opportunity, which the Fabians also refused to publish. Written in a satirical form - as a supposed Ph.D dissertation by a Manchester grammar school graduate in 2034 - it was expanded to book length and rejected by 11 publishers before it appeared as The Rise Of The Meritocracy (1958). In the end, it coined a new word for the language, sold 500,000 copies in 12 languages, helped to abolish the 11-plus examination, made the left think more carefully about equal opportunities, and widened support for a pluralistic society.
He inspired loyalty and exasperation in equal amounts from the staff of his many projects - loyalty for his kindness, sense of fun and gentleness, exasperation at the iron determination with which he pursued his ideas. He loved ruffling feathers.
Michael Young, Lord Young of Dartington: born 1915; died, January 2002