Freedom and Equality

In these final stages in our quest to find the compleat social worker, we need to engage with some of social work’s more profound political and philosophical challenges. In this chapter and the next, we consider how social workers have recognised the fundamental role that politics and philosophy, ideology and values play in everyday practice. We begin with two major concepts — freedom and equality — that tend to pull thinking and practice in opposite directions, not just for social workers but for social policy and political theorists alike.