SOURCE: Perkin, Harold. “Interfere! Don't Interfere!” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4625 (22 November 1991): 25.

In the following review, Perkin asserts that Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion is a masterful sequel to The Idea of Poverty.

Twenty years ago, the Welfare State had achieved a level of consensus which promised “the end of history” in social policy. Since then, Thatcherism and Reaganomics have come and gone, challenging the assumption that poverty could and would soon be abolished, and being challenged in turn in their assumption that tax concessions to the rich would “trickle down” in benefits to the poor. On either front, instead of progress slowly escalating from poverty to affluence, we have Albert Hirschman's repeated swing of the pendulum between public action and private interest, between government intervention and reaction against the spendthrift state. More recently, Ralf Dahrendorf has identified The Modern Social Conflict (1991) between “provisions” (economic growth) and “entitlements” (benefits as...