Overview

""Fighting Poverty With Virtue"" is both an historical and a contemporary study of attempts to promote the self-reliance and prosperity of America's urban poor by encouraging the practice of mundane virtues such as diligence, sobriety, thrift and familial responsibility. Part 1 examines the eforts of four thoughtful 19th-century moral reformers who expounded this strategy: Joseph Tuckerman, Robert M. Hartley, Charles Loring Brace and Josephine Shaw Lowell. This section explains concretely what they did (and why they did it), taking note of the obstacles confronting their work and their successes and failure in overcoming them. Part 2 explains the 20th-century critique of moral reform. Drawing from the work of figures such as Jane Addams, Walter Rauschenbusch, and (more recently) Frances Fox Piven, it examines the rise of a belief that the virtues promoted by the moral reformers were individualistic and ""bourgeois"", hence inapplicable to the lives of the poor. Part 3 assesses African Americans' historical commitment to the moral reformers' virtues, apparent in the writings of figures as divergent as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and Malcolm X. Moving to the present, the book examines Americans' increasing respect for the utility and importance of the supposedly ""bourgeois"" virtues, as manifested in both survey data and in improvements in various statistical indicators. The renewed commitment to a self-help strategy for fighting poverty is evident in the widepsread interest in the work of faith-based charities and in recent shifts in public policy. The book concludes by assessing the reasons to be hopeful, but also to be skeptical, of the success of that strategy. ""Fighting Poverty With Virtue"" should interest a wide variety of historians and social scientists, as well as lay readers eager to understand the plight of the impoverished residents of America's cities, both yesterday and today.

Full Product Details

9780253337719

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

JOEL SCHWARTZ has published widely in political philosophy and public policy. He has taught political science at the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and the University of Virginia; served as executive editor of The Public Interest; and conducted research at the Statistical Assessment Service and the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He is currently a contributing editor of Philanthropy.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available