Moynihan's Book

Abstract

Charles Grosser's diatribe against Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding lends itself to many interpretations, but it is certainly no book review. The book traces the origins of the concept of maximum feasible participation of the poor in the War on Poverty and shows how this idea was based on theory that given the opportunity for economic advancement, through education and job training, delinquency and anomie could be reduced. He then describes how in the process of implementing the idea of maximum feasible participation, the goal of enabling the poor to enter the opportunity structure of the larger society through individual effort tended to be supplanted by efforts to organize the poor as a power bloc that could bargain with the established power configurations in society. The book suggests that the vaunted objectivity of the social scientist is as much influenced by value orientations as is that of the man in the street. In the interest of the professional objectivity that social work ostensibly seeks, something went wrong here. KEYWORDS: Juvenile justice; juvenile delinquency