Critical Social Work

Although there is a great deal of intellectual excitement around the idea of being a radical social worker, it is quite hard to translate all this political fervour into some kind of day-to-day practice. It was all very well for the sociologists and political theorists to expose the true nature of liberal, capitalist economic democracies and how their systems, including state welfare services supported the interests of the rich and powerful, but all this social theorizing left social work sympathizers feeling either guilty or helpless. Moreover, there were early signs that Marxist sociology, on which so much of the original ideas of radical social work were based, was beginning to go out of fashion.