The slashing of the social programs by the Reagan administration poses the most serious threat to the welfare state since its origins in the Great Depression.  In this book, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward propose an explanation why a new class war has been declared not only on the poor but on workers as well.

Piven and Cloward start by examining the enormous changes that the current administration has brought about in our social policies.  However, they go well beyond the usual examination of cuts and ask, for the first time, the underlying questions why these policies were carried out and what their overall economic impact is meant to be.  They go on to predict that this assault will be resisted.  Since the New Deal, Americans have come to recognize that government plays a major role in economic life, that it is responsible for the economic well-being of its citizenry.

That was not always so.  The politicization of economic rights represents a radical departure from traditional American beliefs.  In contrast to much of Europe, working people in the United States have rarely demanded government intervention on their own behalf.  The major reason that government had little proper role in economic life was the prevalence of laissez-faire doctrine.  Piven and Cloward examine the distinctively American institutions that gave life to this doctrine, and show how these gradually broke down as state intervention in the economy expanded throughout the twentieth century.  Their re-examination of American history is daring and provocative.  It proposes a perspective on the American past that is harshly realistic, and a perspective on the American future that is boldly optimistic.

The New Class War is one of those rare books that manages, in the compass of a very few pages, to offer new answers to long-standing and basic questions.  It will be read and debated for years to come.