Social Policy

Ralf Dahrendorf

• Understanding Social Policy by Michael Hill
  Blackwell, 280 pp, £12.00, April 1980, ISBN 0 631 18170 9
• Poverty and Inequality in Common Market Countries edited by Vic George and Roger Lawson
  Routledge, 253 pp, £9.50, April 1980, ISBN 0 7100 0424 9
• Planning for Welfare: Social Policy and the Expenditure Process edited by Timothy Booth
  Blackwell, 208 pp, £12.00, November 1980, ISBN 0 631 19560 2
• The City and Social Theory by Michael Peter Smith
  Blackwell, 315 pp, £12.00, April 1980, ISBN 0 631 12151 X
• The Good City: A Study of Urban Development and Policy in Britain by David Donnison
  Heinemann, 221 pp, £4.95, April 1980, ISBN 0 435 85217 5
• The Economics of Prosperity: Social Priorities in the Eighties by David Blake and Paul Ormerod
  Grant Mclntyre, 230 pp, £3.95, April 1980, ISBN 0 86216 013 8

Must social policy be boring? After all, economic policy still keeps people awake while the phoney war between neo-Keynesians and monetarists lasts. Political policy (sit venia verba) continues to excite the adherents and opponents of adversary politics. Educational policy naturally interests the new educational class which dominates the journals and the universities. Defence policy provides a nice dividing line between those who believe that our survival depends on a new generation of Polaris rockets and those who are slightly embarrassed when asked where they propose to get the money from which they want to spend on doing good. But social policy?