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Radical Incrementalism Personified The Piven and Cloward Legacy Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward’s work represents a distinctive alternative on how to combine welfare scholarship and politics. They were perhaps the most important people to have done so in the twentieth century. Piven and Cloward’s work remains to this day among the most influential scholarship about issues of social welfare. Their first book, Regulating the Poor, published in 1971, has remained in print for over thirty years, being reissued in 1992 in an updated edition.1 This book originally won the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and over time has emerged as a modern classic in the field of social theory. Six more books followed, including The Breaking of the American Social Compact, published in 1997, in addition to scores of scholarly articles and essays.2 Several of their works, particularly Regulating the Poor and Poor People’s Movements,3 have provoked continuing controversy among social theorists and activists. Their last book, Why Americans Still Don’t Vote, revisits their successful effort in founding in 1983 Human SERVE, an organization that led the fight for the Motor Voter bill that was enacted in 1993 as the National Voter Registration Act.4 Richard Cloward passed away in August 2001. Frances Fox Piven remains an active scholar and activist leading the fight over welfare policy. Piven and Cloward consistently grounded all of their scholarship in the struggles for social justice, especially among the poor and oppressed. All their scholarship was directed toward understanding the limits and possibilities for social change. They pursued these studies always with an eye to helping make such change possible and worked tirelessly for social justice causes, movements, and organizations among the poor to make these changes more likely. Over the course of their careers, Piven and Cloward’s combining scholarship and activism have been subject to intense criticism. In what follows, I defend them from much of this criticism and suggest 3 49 that they do indeed offer a laudable model of how to combine scholarship and politics. I suggest how their approach contributes to what I call “radical incrementalism.”5 “Radical incrementalism” involves pushing for substantial change while learning to take what the powerful will concede. It is for me one major way a critical left can still be politically relevant in the face of entrenched power. My analysis is in good part designed to make a contribution to the literature on the growing role of social scientists in the public policymaking process. Rather than focus on the increasingly noted rise of think-tank researchers inside the beltway of the nation’s capital, I look at Piven and Cloward as offering a better model, one that is more powerful in its ability to resist the political co-optation to which think-tank research has proven so vulnerable.6 Piven and Cloward’s efforts to combine politics and scholarship offer a healthy antidote to the depressingly common pattern of social science being co-opted into rationalizing the powers of the state. In what follows, I contrast their efforts to combine scholarship and politics on the issue of welfare rights in the 1960s with the efforts of Daniel P. Moynihan, a prominent politician who was also a social scientist, one who tried to have a political impact on issues of welfare and poverty. I also examine the efforts of David Ellwood, an economist from Harvard University ’s Kennedy School of Government who worked in the Clinton administration on behalf of welfare reform. I suggest how Piven and Cloward’s work offers the superior model to those offered by Moynihan and Ellwood. Piven and Cloward’s model obviates significant problems in combining scholarship and politics. It successfully combines a “politics of survival” that helped people in confronting the challenges in their everyday existence with a “politics of social change” that laid the groundwork for moving beyond the limitations of the existing social order. I suggest that such a combination is especially effective in mitigating asymmetries in power relationships between scholars and citizens that often arise when trying to combine scholarship and politics, theory and practice, social science and social welfare. I follow this with an analysis that demonstrates that their model holds up even when examined in terms of its most controversial application— the “Crisis Strategy.” This strategy, when advocated by Piven and Cloward in the mid-1960s, called for overloading the welfare system with as many recipients...

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