What the Anti-Poverty Activists Hath Wrought

Who Killed Civil Society?: The Rise of Big Government and the Decline of Bourgeois Norms argues that “formative” efforts by private organizations to prevent social problems from appearing in the first place have been supplanted by the “reformative” efforts of government programs to remedy problems once they appear. This has only made the problems worse, says author Howard Husock.
It is a point that, in various forms, has been made before—and Husock, formerly director of case studies in public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and now vice president of the Manhattan Institute and a contributor to City Journal, acknowledges and cites those who’ve made it. His short book makes it somewhat differently, however. It is a collection of profiles of six influential figures, five from history and one from the present, who have tried to fight poverty and its many related consequences.
The six subjects are: Children’s Aid Society founder Charles Loring Brace; Jane Addams, who founded Hull House; social work pioneer and Russell Sage Foundation official Mary Richmond; federal Children’s Bureau leader Grace Abbott; Wilbur Cohen, an official of what was at its creation called the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Husock’s talents as a storytelling journalist and as a public policy professor overseeing academic case studies are well put to use in Who Killed Civil Society? Placed together as “snapshots,” its profiles help tell a larger story, engagingly tracing an unfortunate development: the displacement of civil society by the state.
...Husock’s question remains, then, and may be even tougher to answer than we all would have thought. Who Killed Civil Society? is essentially an autopsy, and a pathologist is not a midwife. For those wanting a rebirth of civil society and trying to figure out how best to work towards it, the story told by the book’s profiles is a necessary part of the historical background.

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