Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare

Notes

Notes Notes to the Int ro duction 1. Michael B. Katz, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001). 2. Sanford F. Schram, After Welfare: The Culture of Postindustrial Social Policy (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 3. See Pamela Loprest, “How Families That Left Welfare Are Doing: A National Picture.” B-1 in “New Federalism: National Survey of America’s Families” Series. (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 1999); and Sheila R. Zedlewski and Donald W. Alderson, “Before and After Reform: How Have Families on Welfare Changed?” B32 in “New Federalism: National Survey of America’s Families” Series. (Washington , DC: Urban Institute, 2001). 4. Martha F. Davis, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960–1973 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 5. See Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6. See Sanford F. Schram, Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 7. See Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 65–72. 8. See Schram, Words of Welfare. For a historical perspective on how bureaucratization of social welfare programs encouraged the marginalization of critical social welfare scholarship, especially feminist work, see Camilla Stivers, Bureau Men and Settlement Women (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). 9. See Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. ix, where Bernstein writes: Aristotle . . . uses “praxis” to designate one of the ways of life open to a free man, and to signify the sciences and arts that deal with the activities characteristic of man’s ethical and political life. In this context, the contrast that Aristotle draws is between “theoria” and “praxis” where the former expression signifies those 245 sciences and activities that are concerned with knowing for its own sake. This contrast is an ancestor of the distinction between theory and practice that has been central to almost every major Western philosopher since Aristotle. 10. Ibid., p. xi, where Bernstein writes: [Y]oung left Hegelians in the 1840s . . . [embarked on] an urgent quest to go “beyond ” Hegel. In this quest the concept of “praxis” arose on the horizon. Cieszkowski seems to have coined this “new” use of “praxis” and declared that the role of philosophy was “to become a practical philosophy or rather a philosophy of practical activity, of ‘praxis’ exercising a direct influence on social life and developing the future in the realm of concrete activity.” . . . What distinguishes Marx from other left Hegelians is that he soon grew impatient with vague talk about praxis and he went on to develop a thorough, systematic and comprehensive theory of praxis. Marx’s theory of praxis is perhaps best summed up by the last of his eleven theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it.” See Bernstein, Praxis and Action, p. 13. 11. See Brian Fay, Social Theory and Political Practice (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975), p. 97. For additional considerations on the relationship of theory to practice, see Jeffrey Isaac, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” Political Theory 23 (November 1995): 636–652; John G. Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); and Samuel A. Chambers, “Spectral History, Untimely Theory,” Theory & Event 3 (2000) (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v003/3.4chambers .html). 12. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, p. 31. 13. See Schram, After Welfare, pp. 178–182, for an initial discussion of “radical incrementalism.” 14. See Rasto Eräsaari, “Why Recognition of Contingency Is Not Surrendering to Contingency,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999): 132–146. 15. For a thorough analysis that recognizes the need to account for the politics in social welfare research but does not go very far beyond that, see O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge. 16. See Schram, Words of Welfare. 17. For an eloquent plea to allow problems to have priority over methods in the structuring of research, see Ian Shapiro, “Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or: What’s Wrong with Political Science and What to Do About It” (Charles E. Lindblom Lecture on Public Policy, Yale University, February 2001) (http://pantheon.yale.edu/~ianshap/Lindblom%20Lecture.pdf). 246 | Notes to the...