Quixote's Ghost

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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 sincethe 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 withproposals 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 fromthe 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 socialpolicy. 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 weeffectively 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 Leftwhose actions-like Don Quixote's obsession with chivalry-are out of synch with thepresent 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 b