The Solidarities Of Strangers

A study of English policies toward the poor from the 1600s to the present, showing how clients and officials negotiated welfare settlements.

Solidarity of Strangers is a crucial intervention in feminist, multicultural, and legal debates that will ignite a rethinking of the meaning of difference, community, and participatory democracy. Arguing for a solidarity rooted in a respect for difference, Dean offers a broad vision of the shape of postmodern democracies that moves beyond the limitations and dangers of identity politics. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

In many countries, particularly in the Global North, established forms of solidarity within communities are said to be challenged by the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of the population. Against the backdrop of renewed geopolitical tensions – which inflate and exploit ethno-cultural, rather than political-economic cleavages – concerns are raised that ethnic and cultural diversity challenge both the formal mechanisms of redistribution and informal acts of charity, reciprocity and support which underpin common notions of community. This book focuses on the innovative forms of solidarity that develop around the joint appropriation and the envisaged common future of specific places. Drawing on examples from schools, streets, community centres, workplaces, churches, housing projects and sporting projects, it provides an alternative research agenda from the 'loss of community' narrative. It reflects on the different spatiotemporal frames in which solidarities are nurtured, the connections forged between solidarity and citizenship, and the role of interventions by professionals to nurture solidarity in diversity. This timely and original work will be essential reading for those working in human geography, sociology, ethnic studies, social work, urban studies, political studies and cultural studies.

An interdisciplinary study of public attitudes towards the poor in Britain between 1790 and 1835. Sandra Sherman reconsiders a question that has challenged social historians for years: what changes (political, economic and philosophical) lead to the New Poor Law of 1834? As new, scientific methods of regulating the poor were adopted - such as statistics, cost accounting, and cost-benefit analyses - old fashioned paternalism gave way to newer modalities in which the poor were not addressed as individuals but instead were managed en masse. The poor became poverty, a political/economic condition that could be managed from a distance by professionals who had no contact with individuals and made no accommodations to them.

Based on documents from two Suffolk villages, this study examines the operation of the poor law and the individual effort the elderly poor needed to make to survive.

This book brings together philosophers, social psychologists and social scientists to approach contemporary social reality from the viewpoint of solidarity. It examines the nature of different kinds of solidarity and assesses the normative and explanatory potential of the concept. Various aspects of solidarity as a special emotionally and ethically responsive relation are studied: the nature of collective emotions and mutual recognition, responsiveness to others’ suffering and needs, and the nature of moral partiality included in solidarity. The evolution of norms of solidarity is examined both via the natural evolution of the human “social brain” and via the institutional changes in legal constitutions and contemporary work life. This text will appeal to students, scholars, and anyone interested in the interdisciplinary topic of social solidarity.

At a time of increasing fragmentation, growing social tension and global forced migration, solidarity is more than ever an endangered social resource. In this volume, scientists from different disciplines analyze the idea of solidarity, its analytical content as well as practical scope and limits for pluralistic and cosmopolitan societies.

Drawing upon both classical insights and more recent writings, Hearn provides a compelling account of social breakdown in the United States. The book examines the conditions most responsible for the deterioration of social institutions, notably the family, and of communitarian interdependencies, such as those that support neighborhoods. More specifically, Hearn analyzes the defining forces of liberal modernity--among them, especially, the market economy (favored by the political right) and the democratic welfare state (endorsed by the political left)--whose steady expansion has diminished the social contexts that nurture trust, mutuality, and a robust sense of both personal responsibility and social obligation. The originality of Hearn's book lies in the solutions he proposes, which differ from those rooted in what Hearn calls ""the languages of modernity."" Hearn advocates modes that would serve instead to renew solidarity and reclaim social virtue, a repertory of strategies that would answer Emile Durkheim's call for the creation of moral individualism. He assesses various approaches to revitalizing the social settings, the social institutions, and communitarian structures within which people become moral individuals capable of care about and taking responsibility for the fates of others. Readers of this book are invited to draw their own conclusions by relying in larger part on themselves as parents, neighbors, community members, and citizen-participants in a civil society in restoration. As the American Journal of Sociology notes, ""the book succeeds in its goals, and it deserves to be widely read.""Frank Hearn was professor of sociology at the State University of New York, College of Cortland, and the author of Reason and Freedom in Sociological Thought and The Transformation of Industrial Organization.