ABSTRACT
Perhaps most vocal of the contributions to the underclass debate is the set of conservative, or radical right, anti-welfare writings which have been loosely based upon the culture of poverty tradition and a recently renewed interest in constitutional factors. In the US this revitalises discussions held in the 1960s on race, the causes and implications of urban poverty that resulted from the Moynihan report (which had found black families trapped in a ‘tangle of pathology’), and on Oscar Lewis’s writings on the culture of poverty. The rediscovery of urban poverty and inner city decline by radical right philosophy in the late 1970s and 1980s was, however, rooted in both a social and political context (Charles Atherton, 1989). It provided (i) a critique of the cost that middle class taxpayers were bearing in financing social welfare measures; (ii) a claim that welfare states are both ineffectual and counterproductive and, (iii) as Charles Murray (1984) argued in Losing Ground, a radical abolitionist stance in which the entire federal welfare system, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, Food Stamps, and unemployment insurance should be abolished because it is counter-productive and inimical to the social good. Welfare undermines the sources of social solidarity. Berger and Neuhaus (1977) argued that the provision of welfare is deemed to destroy ‘mediating structures’ or ‘those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life’. Government had marginalised religion, taken traditional responsibilities from neighbourhoods, the family no longer had control over the education of their children, and voluntary social service had been destroyed by professional bureaucracy. Public policy should change to defend, rather than undercut such structures (1977:2-6) In the US, Murray has been the most prominent and clear cut writer from the right on the underclass, consistently arguing that it is the task of small-scale voluntary associations to build communities, and that ‘much of what central government must do first of all is to leave people alone’ (1988:297).
