Social Workers and Compassion, Stewart Collins

Abstract

In 1979, that stalwart of social policy, Pinker, suggested that compassion was an integral feature of the human condition and a core driver of social policy. This is something that I myself have developed in my analysis of British social welfare history (Parker, 2023). So, it is particularly meaningful to have the honour of reviewing Collins’s latest book explicitly linking social workers and compassion across a range of directions and levels. Collins outlines his approach to social work employing Voltaire’s Candide, who, himself, draws on the optimism of his teacher Pangloss as an example of possibility through adversity. This sits alongside Collins’s familial history of his grandfather tending to his garden in an unsympathetic or harsh landscape. Collins’s adopted style reflects the culmination of years of social work practice, research and scholarship in which he has honed his compassionate, and passionate, understanding of social work and social workers’ conception of it. The seven chapters of this book build on evidence and excavation through research and Collins’s long experience in the discipline, setting the context before critiquing compassion in social work. The individual format, in which each chapter can be read as a self-contained unit, is helpful in lending itself to practical application for busy practitioners or students.