Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley, Society on the Edge: Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States

Once upon a time, somewhere between 1910 and 1960, American sociology textbooks were organized around social problems: crime, mental disorders, poverty, family, sometimes war or the ghetto. The volume edited by Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley Society at the Edge harks back to this tradition, by exploring the fate of nine social problems in the postwar period at the intersection of social science and public policy. It gives the contributions a coherence that is often missing in edite...