Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy

According to conventional wisdom, American social policy has always been exceptional--exceptionally stingy and backwards. But Edwin Amenta reminds us here that sixty years ago the United States led the world in spending on social provision. He combines history and political theory to account for this surprising fact--and to explain why the country's leading role was short-lived.


The orthodox view is that American social policy began in the 1930s as a two-track system of miserly "welfare" fo...