Code: 04516630

Quixote's Ghost

Name: Quixote's Ghost
Brand: Oxford University Press Inc
SKU: 04516630
Price: 64.74 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: David Stoesz
ISBN: 9780195181203

by David Stoesz

Language: English
Binding: Hardback
Number of pages: 264
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, 2005
More about this

64.74 €

In stock at our supplier
Shipping in 10 - 18 days

Add to wishlist

Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language
37.26 €
Buy

Give this book as a present today

Order book and choose Gift Order.
We will send you book gift voucher at once. You can give it out to anyone.
Book will be send to donee, nothing more to care about.

Book gift voucher sample Read more

You get 157 loyalty points

Book synopsis

American social policy, writes David Stoesz, is currently experiencing an alarming paradigm shift. Quixote's Ghost, a provocative new analysis of the ideological fight for control of American social welfare policy, demonstrates how the Right pirated the pragmatism championed by the Left since the New Deal and what that means for the future of social policy. Stoesz's fascinating account documents how conservative think tanks arose to combat the dominance of liberal intellectualism in the university system, and by now have taken command of the "means of analysis," flooding Congress with proposals and effectively shifting American public philosophy from liberalism to conservatism. While the Right devoted enormous amounts of energy in reconstructing social policy, Stoesz argues that the American liberal-intellectual class-the Liberati-abandoned its original mission, defecting from the welfare state project to pursue a philosophical tangent, postmodernism, that vilified social policy and romanticized oppressed populations. Presenting case studies from welfare reform and children's services, he illustrates how both the Right and the Left have shortchanged American social policy. In the process, he proposes radical pragmatism as the solution to counter the dominance of an emerging welfare-industrial complex and revive a Progressive orientation to social policy. Only through citizen empowerment, social mobility, and government restructuring, Stoesz argues, can we effectively craft a new approach to social policy that meets the requirements of the 21st century and transcends the impasse between the Left and the Right. Quixote's Ghost, framed by the metaphor of a Romantic Left whose actions-like Don Quixote's obsession with chivalry-are out of synch with the present reality, will be of immense interest to students and academics alike. As one of the few books to chart this radical shift in social policy and its implications on the ground, it will be sure to challenge both the Right and the Left to craft a new approach to thinking about American social policy.