Abstract

Nathan Glazer's The Limits of Social Policy presents an analysis of recent American social policy that Edmund Burke could applaud. A main cause of the failure of American social programs, Glazer argues, is that government ineluctably supplants and weakens the ?fine structure?; of society?the traditional institutions of family, religion, and community. Sometimes the government is merely clumsy and ignorant, but more often the ill effects are the result of ?the ruling doctrines of our age,?; equality and human rights, which cannot bear to leave the convoluted and sometimes unlovely ways of custom and local mores to play themselves out unimpeded. But the very persuasiveness of Glazer's analysis of the past casts some doubt on his measured optimism about the future. Are moderate reforms going to be good enough? Perhaps things will work out for the middle class and affluent, the reviewer argues, but the underclass increasingly appears to be a casualty of moderate reforms. The reviewer offers some reasons for thinking about a return to Jeffersonian self?government, unpragmatic as that may seem in 1991.