Compassion

A book that manages to be simultaneously deep and global, ranging from our hunter-gatherer ancestors to the neo-liberal slash-backs of the 1980s. Who knew it was possible to write an epic panorama of the welfare state? * Peter Baldwin, UCLA and NYU, USA *
Alvin Finkel’s Compassion provides an ambitious historic review of global welfare provision, exploring the underlying nature of how obligations to others are formed and reformed over time. For students of social policy it is a timely reminder of the importance of compassion and some of the contemporary challenges faced when mobilising this characteristic into future welfare endeavours. * Lee Gregory, University of Birmingham, UK *
Most books concerning social policy and welfare focus on developments in the Global North and place such within recent local or colonial histories. Finkel provides a refreshing alternative drawing on prehistories and early societies from around the world alongside recognizing traditional accounts. This book is significant and likely to become a classic. * Jonathan Parker, Bournemouth University, UK *
An impressive book filled with rich detail and grounded in solid research. It is comprehensive and extremely well-organized and well-written. Compassion is also an essential resource for those who study history, sociology, political science, social administration, social policy and social work. Moreover, this work will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand more about how and why human beings treat each other the way they do, why we have poverty, why we have wars. * Therese Jennissen, Carleton University, Canada in Canadian Dimension (2019) *
This is much more, in other words, than a history of social policy and welfare states. It’s a history of inclusion and exclusion, the unevenness of democratic participation, the often-violent contours of citizenship, and of how we “humanize and dehumanize others” and why. Finkel reminds us that social policy has been and continues to be a vehicle for alleviating poverty, improving lives, and creating justice – but that condescension and domination are just as frequently mobilized in the name of “compassion.” These are valuable lessons, and this book is a necessary read, for anyone interested in using social policy to build a better world. * Lisa Pasolli, Queen’s University, Canada, in Labour/Le Travail (Spring 2020) *