New Books In Public Policy

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) is a detail and illuminating analysis of the reception of Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Geary argues that the report was neither a conservative or a liberal document but rather a conflicted one whose internal contradictions reflected the breakup of the liberal consensus and its legacy. The ambiguities of the report allowed multiple interpretations, from both the left and the right, and marked the emergence of neoconservatism. Conservatives used the report to rally against the liberal welfare state and promote African Americans self-help. Liberals saw in the document the need to go beyond legal equality to aggressive economic intervention through training programs, job creation and the family wage. The extensive and long debate over the report involved the issues o