Book Description
Unemployment, poverty and role of the state were themes which structured the discourse of social theory and the developing social legislation in Britain at the end of the Victorian period and the early twentieth century. This collection examines the neglected contribution of Bernard and Helen Bosanquet to that contemporary maelstrom of ideas about the condition of the people, the process of social reform and the practice of social work. Like their contemporaries Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Bosanquets were a significant partnership integrating philosophy and practice, theory and action. Bernard Bosanquet, the Idealist philosopher, is best known for his study The Philosophical Theory of the State. His wife Helen, economist and social worker, was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905-9) and between 1909 and 1921 editor of the Charity Organisation Review. Themselves selective supporters of state welfare schemes, they helped to refashion the Charity Organisation Society away from its nineteenth century individualism by their advocacy of organic social collectivism.
