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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ken Moffat, A Poetics of Social Work: Personal Agency and Social Transformation in Canada, 1920–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001)

WHY SHOULD social workers help the poor? With what aims? In the name of which principles? What is the basis of their legitimacy? Should they engage personally and emotionally with the people they are helping? During the inter-war years, several Canadian social workers believed that a strong philosophical, moral, scientific, and practical basis was needed for their profession to survive and to develop.

Eight decades later, the openness and the depth of their discussions come as a surprise. As the historian of British social policy, Jose Harris, has observed, by the 1970s, lawmakers and practitioners rarely discussed the moral foundations of their actions. She suggests that, after three decades of relative consensus over the institutions of the welfare state and of consolidation of a technical jargon within the profession, many thought that they could dispense with references to philosophical principles. This stance, adds Harris, made the social policies of the Depression and the post-war years especially vulnerable to critics from the right who, for a while in the 1970s and the 1980s, could present themselves as the only bearers of the true principles of liberal democracy. The challenge, in turn, has prompted many historians of the last two decades to study the intellectual and political traditions of the pioneers of philanthropy and social work.

Ken Moffat has devoted an inspiring, knowledgeable, and concise little book to a reflection on four Canadian social workers, namely Edward Johns Urwick, the British-born and trained director of the University of Toronto's School of Social Work; the Prairie- born poet and communist activist Dorothy Livesay; the McGill sociologist and administrator Carl Dawson; and the Ontarian director of the Canadian Council of Child Welfare, Charlotte Whitton. The four middle chapters of the monograph represent as many portraits of the four individuals. The word "poetics" in the title indicates how personal Moffat found their engagement to be with the surrounding political and social events, and how earnest their attempts were to make their thought universal. The readers will find, for instance, inviting considerations, in Livesay's work, on the relation between the "act of creation" and "social welfare concerns."(67) She was also the clearest on the differences of social and economic status between social workers and clients.

The project of this book is informed by the program for the recovery of "patterns of thinking" of the French philosopher of language, Michel Foucault, exposed in The Order of Things. Moffat presents this theory in an introduction and a solid historiographical chapter on "Concepts of Social Service and Social Change." He locates his work within the ongoing research on the history of the epistemology of social work that has been the project of a group of fellow scholars centred around Allan Irving and the Faculty of Social Work of the University of Toronto. Finally, the author underlines the 'modern' nature of social workers' wish "to reconstruct both the individual and the society"(29) with the help of Charles Taylor's and Marshall Berman's reflections.

In the final chapter, a comparative analysis of the four 'archetypes' shows that the same problems mobilized writers across political, religious, and gender divides. All questioned the premises of the techniques of social work and their moral limits, the importance of the experience of working with the poor in contrast with the place of ideal thought and social research, the role of religious, ethical, and subjective considerations in relation to the place of neutral intervention, and the nature of desirable social relations.

Within this shared agenda, Dawson and Whitton advocated a scientific approach to social work, closer to the American tradition of social sciences, whereas Livesay and Urwick privileged the ideals and methods of the humanities, which were generally dearer to British academics. Both deplored the individualistic understandings of freedom of their contemporaries which, they thought, led to emotional self-absorption at the expense of social engagements.

Then again, the alignments change when one considers that the two women of the group converged in their promotion of practical experience and of the moral and emotional commitment of individuals against the more detached propositions of the two men. Together with recent historians of gender, Moffat suggests that, for them, the secularization of social work did not mean the disappearance of religion, but its reinvestment in the idea of the profession as a mission. Moreover, Whitton did not see the rise of scientific truths in opposition to the sacred, but as a way to approach the wonders of nature.

The traditions of social thought in which Carl Dawson and Charlotte Whitton placed themselves have been less studied than Livesay's and Urwick's, mainly because their principles, such as Whitton's belief in the virtues of community solidarity, are less thoroughly discussed in their own writings. But, as Moffat suggests, Whitton's objections to the detrimental impact of bureaucratic states on individual autonomy and resourcefulness referred to ideas of "rights and responsibilities" of citizens and of "stewardship" of professionals. (87–88). They cannot be dismissed as the useful pretext to reduce public spending they also became in the 1930s. Of the four Canadian social workers, Carl Dawson's "organic" idea of the "stability" of a "normal society" may have most clearly anticipated the shape of the future. Studies of the professional ethos of later social work would probably gain much from the examination of the philosophical reference points of Dawson.

The Poetics of Social Work demonstrates that the study of the debates over social work at a time before it was fully professionalized and therefore remained "everyone's business" (25) sheds light on the beginnings of the discipline, and raises questions about the meaning of social work.


Dominique Marshall (Visiting Scholar) Oxford Brookes University

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