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The Politics of Social Welfare: The Collapse of the Center and the Rise of the Right. By Alex Waddan. Cheltenham, UK, and Brookfield, MA: Edward Elgar, 1997. 204p. $70.00.
Stathis N. Kalyvas, New York University
How did the Right win the battle of ideas surrounding the welfare state? How did liberals allow the debate to shift from social justice and poverty to dependency? In other words, how did important parts of New Right ideology permeate the liberal consciousness and become established parts of the conventional wisdom? This book discusses the rise and crisis of the welfare state in the United States and offers an argument explaining the ideological defeat of pro-welfare liberals by the Right. It provides a detailed overview of welfare state-building, beginning with President Johnson's War on Poverty (particularly the Economic Opportunity Act) and including numerous defeated initiatives, such as President Nixon's negative income tax and family assistance plan, and President Carter's Program for Better Jobs and Income. The book's twin focus is on social policy and the ideological context in which it is conceived and implemented.
Waddan is particularly keen on explaining "the open and agonizing nature of the collapse of faith in the capacity of social welfare liberalism to provide solutions" (p. 46). The central argument is that the way in which the welfare state was built in the 1960s undermined its future: the model underpinning it was not viable in the long term; whatever its merits, it could not last. Overly optimistic and naive liberal reformers defined poverty...