ABSTRACT
This study forms part of a larger project about the identity and purpose of social work, the terms of which proceed from the general premise that social work as commonly apprehended in western countries emerged out of the late nineteenth century as part of extensive social, economic, religious, industrial, educational, political and philosophical shifts. These movements were manifested in what from the 1860s were referred to in newly minted and fluid language as the social sciences. In late nineteenth century, Europe and North America, the emerging outlines of what would become social work shared particularly with sociology that, as a distinct way of practice and thought, it ‘came into being in the face of momentous historical changes and from the first was shaped by the experience of those changes’ (Abrams 1982, 3). In that swirl of developments, led perhaps by the process of western industrialisation, ‘Again and again we find the concern for facts and for rationalisation mixed up with a counteracting moral sensibility’ (Abrams 1968, 31). The social conditions and intellectual history of the period are deeply intertwined.
