Quixote's Ghost

by David Stoesz

"American social policy, writes David Stoesz, is currently experiencing an alarming paradigm shift. Quixote's Ghost, an analysis of the ideological fight for control of America's social welfare policy, demonstrates how the Right pirated the pragmatism championed by the Left since the New Deal and what that means for the future of social policy. Stoesz's 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 with proposals and effectively shifting American public philosophy from liberalism to conservatism. While the Right devoted enormous amounts of energy to reconstructing social policy, Stoesz argues that the American liberal-intellectual class - the Liberati - abandoned its original mission, defecting from the welfare state project to pursue a philosophical tangent, postmodernism, that vilified social policy and romanticized oppressed