From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism

Recent welfare debates sometimes invoke Lyndon Johnson's and Franklin Roosevelt's names as the promiscuous fathers of an errant welfare system, yet in reality both the "New Deal" and the "War on Poverty" were responses to a nation in crisis and also rooted in ethics closer to today's rhetoric than short-sighted readers of history would lead us to believe. Davies' examination of welfare philosophy, LBJ, the swirl of the civil rights movement, riots, and Vietnam economics traces a liberalism that embraced personal responsibility, and then abandoned the ethic in a "politics of dissent" discourse. Although the author restores the good names of Roosevelt and Johnson by his careful scholarship and even handed historical treatment, the question still remains: What is a nation's responsibility to its poor? Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.