In this intellectual history of the fraught relationship between
race and poverty in the 1960s, Robin Marie Averbeck offers a
sustained critique of the fundamental assumptions that structured
liberal thought and action in postwar America. Focusing on the
figures associated with "Great Society liberalism" like Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, David Riesman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
Averbeck argues that these thinkers helped construct policies that
never truly attempted a serious attack on the sources of racial
inequality and injustice.
In Averbeck's telling, the Great Society's most notable
achievements--the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--came
only after unrelenting and unprecedented organizing by black
Americans made changing the inequitable status quo politically
necessary. And even so, the discourse about poverty created by
liberals had inherently conservative qualities. As
Liberalism Is
Not Enough reveals, liberalism's historical relationship with
capitalism shaped both the initial content of liberal scholarship
on poverty and its ultimate usefulness to a resurgent conservative
movement.