The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State. By Klein, Steven . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 250 p. $99.99 cloth

Chapter 3 offers Klein’s account of “welfare institutions as worldly things—as collections of objects, paperwork, buildings, material infrastructures—that render our material and biological needs amenable to shared judgment and action” (p. 57). Klein here offers a particular picture of how social transformation occurs, as domination can be denaturalized and made to appear contingent and contestable when one group “alienates itself from the common moral context implicit in its claim to legitimacy” (p. 140); for example, when the ruling class engages in exploitation that undermines its own claim that market society is free and equal. [...]while Klein briefly argues that his account applies to conditions of US racial domination by pointing to the history of community engagement during the War on Poverty, I am not sure the book takes the full measure of how white supremacy poses a challenge to its account. [...]neoliberalism is not just an economic doctrine that has led to austerity policies but also a pervasive way of seeing that has changed how ordinary people think of the public realm and how they relate to the very prospect of solidarity.