Book review of David Stoesz, Quixote\u27s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. $ 35.00 hardcover

Pimpare, Stephen

English

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University of New HampshireUniversity of New Hampshire Scholars' RepositoryBusiness, Politics & Security Studies FacultyScholarship Business, Politics & Security Studies5-1-2007Review of Quixote’s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati,and the Future of Social PolicyStephen PimpareUniversity of New Hampshire, Manchester, stephen.pimpare@unh.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/unhmbusiness_facpubThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Business, Politics & Security Studies at University of New Hampshire Scholars'Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Business, Politics & Security Studies Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Universityof New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.Recommended CitationPimpare, S. David Stoesz, Quixote’s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy (Oxford). Journal of Sociology &Social Welfare 34, no. 1 (March 2007): 177-80.The Journal of Sociology & Social WelfareVolume 34Issue 1 March Article 122007Quixote's Ghost: The Right, the Liberati and the Futureof Social Policy. David Stoesz. Reviewed by StephenPimpare.Stephen PimpareYeshiva UniversityFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jsswPart of the Social Work CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the SocialWork at ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contactmaira.bundza@wmich.edu.Recommended CitationPimpare, Stephen (2007) "Quixote's Ghost: The Right, the Liberati and the Future of Social Policy. David Stoesz. Reviewed by StephenPimpare.," The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 34 : Iss. 1 , Article 12.Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol34/iss1/12Book Reviews 177health epidemiology model, the environment is a powerful andintervening force in considering the interaction between thehost and the causative agent leading to a specific outcome. Inother words, the environment can either alleviate, exacerbate,or maintain the relationship between the specific causativeagent and the individual or host. For example, when trying toget people to reduce or stop smoking, the impact of tobacco,where marketing and advertising are promotional activitiesand are key agents in the process, one must remember thateach is external/environmental to the primary relationshipbetween tobacco intake (agent) and the individual host. Thussocial research must continually take into account the particularcontext or environment and period of time when social studiesare conducted. Stinchcombe's perspective refers his brief intro-duction to his check of the core logical issues and problems insociology and methods that have formed the bases of his argu-ment. These issues include outlining the argument; economyin data collection; using data to refine concepts; using data tofind mechanisms and processes; theory testing and using datato refine theories.To place his thoughts in perspective, one must view withcaution today's commentaries on the Civil Rights Movement,the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, when the measurementand analysis fails to take into account the social, economicand political context of the time when these societal effortsemerged, and the relative impact such had on society overtime. Thus, affirmative action, and substance abuse diversionprograms are examples of specific programs which emergedin response to critical needs at that time, and which are oftenexamined and judged by today's "standards."Marvin D. FeitNorfolk State UniversityDavid Stoesz, Quixote's Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and theFuture of Social Policy. New York: Oxford University Press,2005. $ 35.00 hardcover.David Stoesz's Quixote's Ghost is an odd, infuriatingand engaging book, one that can cause a sort of intellectual178 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfarewhiplash: it moves from sharp observation to absurd gen-eralization to reasoned analysis to wild assertion, sometimeswithin the same paragraph. I felt a bit like Quixote myself - ormore accurately, like Sancho Panza, chasing after a madman,not sure whether to protect the world from him or him fromthe world. That, I suspect, was part of the intent. Stoesz wantsto explain why contemporary American social policy hasfailed to better provide safety and security, or to adapt to thepost-industrial world, and he clearly wants be an equal op-portunity offender-that's all to the good, for the Republicanand Democratic parties surely share the blame. Republicansmay be callous and stingy, guilty of sins of commission, Stoeszsuggests, but Democrats have been blind to political realityand bereft of bold ideas, guilty of sins of omission. The passionwith which he makes his case, and his determination to thinkbeyond liberal-conservative paradigms are admirable, butStoesz's arguments and analyses-compelling at first glance-cannot bear up under the weight of careful scrutiny. Quixote'sGhost is provocative, but ultimately unsatisfying.His argument is this: Republican ascendancy in social policyis attributable to their successful efforts to build "networksof influence" in the aftermath of Goldwater's 1964 defeat,efforts driven by think tanks that would come increasingly toembrace empiricism, Stoesz asserts, to advance their cause.They adapted pragmatism - what he identifies as a Liberalphilosophy of the New Deal - to their own ends. By contrast,those Liberal pragmatists who could once be counted uponfor constructive participation in policymaking have retired totheir ivory towers, been consumed by post-modem theoriesthat have caused them to "reject empiricism in favor of identitypolitics," and, as a result, have been in "denial of conservativecontrol of social policy" and failed to provide an alternative tothe obsolete paradigm that was the hallmark of the twentiethcentury. These ineffectual intellectuals are Stoesz's "Liberati."Guilty too is the social work profession, which has similarlybeen obsessed with identity politics (witness the NationalAssociation of Black Social Workers' policy against trans-racialadoption, he says). They too have rejected empiricism in favorof ideology, leaving anthropologists and sociologists to producethe most important works of policy research. And they are alsoBook Reviews 179in denial, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the successes ofconservative achievements, like 1996's welfare reform. Worse,they have failed to convince policymakers of the need for fun-damental reform in child welfare and other arenas.Hence the whiplash-the radical critique is so bound upwith casuistry and conventional wisdom that it is difficult toknow where to begin. Let me focus here only on one of thelargest problems: I heartily agree that the Democratic Party hasfailed those most in need of their advocacy, that the academyhas produced some very silly scholarship under the rubricof post-modem theory, that social work education is insuffi-ciently rigorous, and that social work practice can too oftensuffer from crippling naivet6. But to lay the blame for decadesof regressive social policy at the feet of post-modem professorsand social workers is to blame Sancho Panza for the destruc-tion Don Quixote leaves in his wake. To claim that the Liberatiare complicit would seem defensible. But surely there are moreproximate causes, and more powerful actors to attend to, if wetruly seek to explain the current state of social policy.Stoesz's solution to these and other problems is a call for"radical pragmatism," an approach that is "post-conservative"and "post-liberal," decentralized and democratic, and whichdepends upon technical expertise and acknowledges the ef-ficiency of market mechanisms. Much of this sounds like anupdated Progressivism (if anything united the Progressives itwas a belief in expertise, and in practicality), and seems toolittle informed by the messy reality of politics and policy-making. Ask Harvard professor Mary Jo Bane, the Clintonadvisor who resigned in the aftermath of welfare reform onceshe saw what the political process had done with her careful,practical, pragmatic scholarship. Good policy ideas are useless ifone cannot control enough of the political system to enact andimplement them, and Stoesz's radical pragmatism takes littleaccount of, for example, the debts Democrats and Republicansboth owe to very similar sets of narrow interests who have littlestake in social policy; of the manipulation, by Democrats andRepublicans alike, of Congressional districts, which hardenstheir monopoly over elected offices and reduces their account-ability to the public; and of the manner in which mainstreammedia so poorly serve democratic interests and so rarely help180 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfarecitizens make informed appraisal of the policy choices beforethem, leaving them susceptible to partisan propaganda.Too much in Quixote's Ghost is asserted or assumed, and itis the lack of evidence, just as it was with Thomas Frank's best-selling What's the Matter with Kansas, that constitutes its fatalflaw. Indeed, Frank's entertaining book is a useful comparison:the more one reads, the less the engaging prose and the pro-vocative theses are able to obscure the thinness and incoher-ence of what lies beneath. Quixote's Ghost seems to be a bookabout the politics of social policy, but isn't, because it paystoo little attention to politics and to policy analysis. Ironically,what Stoesz offers is a work of political philosophy-his ownkind of post-modern theory, nearly bereft of the empiricism heso yearns for.Stephen PimpareYeshiva UniversitySheila H. Akabas, Ph.D. and Paul A. Kurzman, Work and theWorkplace: A Resource for Innovative Policy and Practice. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2004. $ 49.50 hardcover.The workplace of the 21st century will increasingly becomeleaner, technologically reliant, and more aggressive in pursuitof a healthy bottom-line. The global competition for resourcesand customers creates tensions between corporations' fidu-ciary responsibility to their shareholders and their ethical re-sponsibility to their employees, their host communities andthe environment. Forward looking work organizations recog-nize that, amid these trends, recruiting and retaining a produc-tive and loyal workforce is dependent on careful attention toemployees' well being and on their ability to assist employ-ees in balancing the often conflicting demands of work andfamily. Sheila Akabas and Paul Kurzman's book, Work and theWorkplace is the definitive scholarly text on occupational socialwork practice. Building on their extensive research, teach-ing, and practical experiences, the authors review the history,contemporary practices and new professional opportunitiesfor social work in the workplace, and create a comprehensive

Review of Quixote’s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy

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Review of Quixote’s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy

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