The jester's joke

This volume has been put together to mark - and indeed celebrate - the 35th amuversary of the publication of Bailey and Brake's (1975) Radical social work. Bailey and Brake's work has become one of the few great, seminal texts of social work in Britain.Today, even those hostile to the general direction of the argument presented in the book, are willing to concede that the book had a significant impact on debates over social work theory and practice in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading the text today there is no doubt that some of the chapters are shaped by the language and concerns of the 1970s Left. But in its emphasis on the inuquities of the social structure of capitalist society, the challenge it posed to state directed bureaucratic welfare, and its emphasis on the public and social causes of private pain, it was contesting and reshaping many of the dominant assumptions of social work theory. In doing so, it was in conrrast to previously dominant perspectives that saw social problems in terms of individual failing and moral ineptitude on the part of' problem communities'.