Suggested Readings: Society and Assistance

Losing Ground: American Social Policy,1950-1980
By Charles Murray
ISBN: 0-465-04231-7

"Charles Murray explains persuasively why, despite enormously increased expenditures on job training, welfare, food stamps, crime control, and education for the poor during the 1960s and 70s, the problems of the target populations—principally the black poor—became worse. He deduces rules to explain the failure, and proposes on the basis of them some awesome shifts in our social policies." — Nathan Glazer, Harvard University

Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
ISBN: 0-679-74173-9

"Himmelfarb draws a three-dimensional portrait of how the Victorians confronted something very like our underclass. The issues they agonized over were astonishingly similar to the ones we agonize over today—the comparative roles of structural factors and personal behavior in creating an underclass, workfare vs. welfare, what to do about the children, the merits of government programs vs. private philanthropy, relative poverty vs. absolute poverty, how to measure poverty. — Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground

From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967
By David T. Beito
ISBN: 0-8078-4841-7

"[Beito's] detailed scholarship proves that people [before the New Deal] fulfilled their needs and desires for community and security by organizing voluntary systems of insurance and group enterprise. The book represents a compelling chapter in the history and character of American society, as well as a lesson in the fertility of non-governmental civic action." — Daniel B. Klein, author of Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct

Democracy in America
By Alexis de Tocqueville
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop
ISBN: 0226805328

"The Mansfield-Winthrop work will henceforth be the preferred English version of Democracy in America not only because of the superior translation and critical apparatus, but also because of its long and masterly introductory essay, itself an important contribution to the literature on Tocqueville." — Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion