In this Book
- Liberalism Is Not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
summary
In this intellectual history of the fraught relationship between race and poverty in the 1960s, Robin Marie Averbeck offers a sustained critique of the fundamental assumptions that structured liberal thought and action in postwar America. Focusing on the figures associated with "Great Society liberalism" like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, David Riesman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Averbeck argues that these thinkers helped construct policies that never truly attempted a serious attack on the sources of racial inequality and injustice.
In Averbeck's telling, the Great Society's most notable achievements--the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--came only after unrelenting and unprecedented organizing by black Americans made changing the inequitable status quo politically necessary. And even so, the discourse about poverty created by liberals had inherently conservative qualities. As Liberalism Is Not Enough reveals, liberalism's historical relationship with capitalism shaped both the initial content of liberal scholarship on poverty and its ultimate usefulness to a resurgent conservative movement.
In Averbeck's telling, the Great Society's most notable achievements--the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--came only after unrelenting and unprecedented organizing by black Americans made changing the inequitable status quo politically necessary. And even so, the discourse about poverty created by liberals had inherently conservative qualities. As Liberalism Is Not Enough reveals, liberalism's historical relationship with capitalism shaped both the initial content of liberal scholarship on poverty and its ultimate usefulness to a resurgent conservative movement.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Introduction
- pp. 1-9
- Chapter One. The Drinking Water
- pp. 10-33
- Chapter Two. Diagnosing Poverty
- pp. 34-51
- Chapter Three. A Culture of Poverty
- pp. 52-72
- Chapter Four. Building the Blame
- pp. 73-97
- Conclusion
- pp. 98-104
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 105-106
- Bibliography
- pp. 123-132
Additional Information
ISBN
9781469646664
Related ISBN(s)
9781469646633, 9781469646640, 9781469646657, 9798890851512
MARC Record
OCLC
1054644517
Pages
150
Launched on MUSE
2019-01-05
Language
English
Open Access
No