When one ideology dominates, social policy shrivels. Instead of a rich and highly contested subject, social policy has shrunk to a choice between hard and soft neoliberalism. In income support, for example, the hard version believes that work is a requirement for welfare; the soft version, that welfare can only be justified as an investment in human capital. Ruth Lister's Understanding Theories and Concepts in Social Policy takes a different tack. Breaking out of these constraints, Lister's book carefully explores all the components of social policy formation. It is an admirable performance, one which has the not-so-incidental effect of restoring the subject to its rightful robustness and complexity.

Lister's exploration of the components of social policy formation begins where it should begin, with a discussion of theoretical perspectives as both an ideology and as an analytical tool. First, there is the ‘the middle way’, a form of Tory collectivism alien to the United States, but one with deep roots in Britain and Canada, whose feudal heritage was more receptive to a dutiful upper class. Arising in response to a radical labour movement and the prospect of a social democratic welfare state, the middle way jettisoned the politics, but accepted the premise of collective responsibility and socialised risk. The conflict between these two perspectives began to wind down in the 1970s, when the increasing mobility of capital outflanked the national welfare state and made it harder to capture the revenues on which it was based. This change in global capitalism led, in turn, to the rapid ascendance of the New Right, embodied by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in England. This New Right has always sought to dispose of social welfare, unless policies emphasised work or further commodified the market for human needs, such as health care and housing. Eventually, its harshness triggered a response from the centre in the form of Clinton/Blair's ‘the third way’, the pliability of which Lister is particularly adept at dissecting.

Lister's review of this history performs two useful functions. By highlighting the richness of past disputes about the welfare state, it illustrates exactly how narrow the accepted range of political discourse has become. In addition, her documentation of this enforced convergence creates space in Lister's narrative for an overview of some marginalised perspectives such as Marxism, Feminism, Anti-Racism and Environmentalism. Although Lister does not specifically ally herself with any of these viewpoints, she treats each fairly, and clearly believes that policy debates have suffered from their exclusion.

Lister knows, however, that it is not merely frank discussions of ideology that have been excluded. The modern conventions of social welfare policy rely heavily on quantitative techniques that often elide many of the most important questions. Among these questions are to what extent does social welfare control, regulate or encourage resistance among the population? How are social problems constructed? And how do we define highly contested concepts, such as needs, citisenship, liberty, equality and social justice? Since different ideologies predispose their proponents to define these concepts in different ways, Lister devotes several chapters to these critical questions. In each instance, she is to be commended for her principled and sophisticated treatment of these issues.

Her treatment of the issue of equality is especially noteworthy. At first glance, its meaning seems clear, but dig a little deeper, and it soon becomes evident that its meaning is not clear at all. Equalities not only come in many different forms – moral, legal, social, political and economic, but also the standards for judging them break down the moment we leave the abstraction behind. There is equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, a `complex equality' that accepts difference as long as it is restricted to separate spheres, and the principle of equity that sees the need to treat some people differently as the only path to true levelling. Attempts to reconcile these principles often lead to awkward hybrids, such as New Labour's meritocratic equality of opportunity, which, as Lister rightly notes, appears to beg more questions than it answers.

Lister's text concludes with a chapter on social movements – in particular, the disability movement and the movement for global social justice. Its inclusion represents a useful corrective to treatments of social policy in a vacuum, as if people, fighting to satisfy their basic human needs, had not brought about the social programs that policy analysts are now examining. Lister is determined to show that theories have relevance: they both inform social movements, at the same time that the endless cycle of theory and practice provides a test of a theory's validity. Like the rest of the text, this chapter is lucid, comprehensive and even-handed – an appropriate capstone to quite a valuable book.