In this study, Alyosha Goldstein examines how U.S. policymakers and activists attempted to use community action as a tool to alleviate poverty after the Second World War. Drawing inspiration from Foucault, Goldstein argues that, through community action programs, liberal policymakers sought to encourage local initiatives and self-governance among the poor and thus obviate the need for direct state intervention. But as he deftly shows through a range of case studies encompassing such places as Puerto Rico, New York, central Appalachia, and Navajo territory, poor people had their own agendas and did not always perform the roles assigned to them. Because concepts like community meant different things to different social groups, community action programs became a perpetual site of political conflict and maneuvering.

While the centerpiece of this analysis is the War on Poverty in the United States, Goldstein highlights the connections between community-based programs in the United States and community development efforts internationally. Scholars of development often suggest that U.S. overseas development projects were an extension of domestic welfare efforts. But as Goldstein compellingly argues, policymakers and social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s understood both domestic and international poverty as foreign, part of a world outside of American norms. At the same time, groups like the Black Panthers identified a common condition of poverty as the basis for global solidarity and anti-colonial politics. The domestic politics of poverty thus did not merely offer a model for the foreign; the two were discursively intertwined.

If Goldstein tracks the story of community action across national boundaries, he also highlights continuities through the twentieth century, including, most strikingly, the last third that we identify as the era of neoliberalism. Throughout the century, liberal policymakers sought to disperse the task of governance beyond the state through the instrument of community. Thus, during what scholars of development have called the era of basic needs in the 1970s, institutions like the World Bank embraced the concepts of participatory development and social capital, which Goldstein suggests redeployed the old idea of community in slightly new ways. “[T]he repertoires of liberal governance do not supply a viable alternative to our current predicament,” Goldstein concludes, “but instead remain to a large extent entangled in the making of these conditions” (246).

By highlighting continuities to the present, Goldstein challenges a common schematic narrative that makes it difficult to understand where neo-liberal thinking came from beyond the Chicago School of Economics and the Mont Pelerin Society. But he achieves continuity by offering an analysis of liberalism in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the book's focus, that comes across as a bit ungenerous and sometimes confusing. He directs his critique at liberalism in the American sense, encompassing Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Across these moments, he argues, liberals saw the poor as a discrete category of people, and poverty as a product of either culture or exclusion from the opportunities of the market; they did not recognize that inequality was a precondition for and product of capitalism. But many liberal policymakers and activists saw stark economic inequality as the outcome of unregulated markets and, eventually, as a structural problem that undermined the economic system by reducing the capacity of consumers to purchase the commodities well-managed companies so efficiently produced. This thinking inspired certain New Deal legislation, like the Wagner and Social Security Acts, which Goldstein places under the purview of liberalism. More generally, we often get a sense from his analysis that, over the course of the century, government policies were the work of a coherent liberal ideology far more than the rough and tumble world of politics. And it is unclear why he chooses not to label as liberal at least some of the oppositional groups in his story, like civil rights organizations.

Goldstein nonetheless provides a provocative analysis of major interest to scholars of poverty politics in the United States, and of international development. One hopes it will offer a basis for future study.