To most of Washington, DC's liberal establishment, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding appeared to be nothing short of apostasy. Authored in 1969 by the one-time Johnson administration insider turned Richard's Nixon's special counselor on urban affairs, the slim volume purported to tell the hard truths about the policy innovation at the heart of the War on Poverty: the community action program. In spite of – or perhaps because of – Moynihan's deserter status, the book became the authoritative memoir of the War on Poverty. Historians of postwar American liberalism have either imbibed Moynihan's thesis – that community action was a fool's errand – or deployed it as proof of how tepid LBJ's commitment to combatting inequality had really been. Stepping over these familiar narratives and out of these well-worn intellectual grooves, Alyosha Goldstein gives us something different, a sustained effort to understand how community action actually worked. More importantly, he explains why community action appealed, for a brief time, to so many different stakeholders in the 1960s struggle against poverty.

An ambitious undertaking that defies easy categorization, the book responds to several recent currents in the history of postwar America by treating foreign and domestic policy, as well as grassroots and elite politics, as inseparable – as a series of reciprocities and antagonisms. He convincingly asserts that empire building abroad and nation building at home were deeply intertwined projects during the Cold War. The strategies employed by the American state in both of these arenas, he argues, rested on a diagnosis of poverty as a political and cultural problem rather than an economic one. To liberal policymakers, “the poor” constituted an agglomerated population, united by a shared inability to access the opportunities provided by postwar affluence. Empowering them with the psychological, emotional, and even practical tools necessary to participate in the vaunted “American way of life” became the state's primary prescription. The omission of a jobs component in the War on Poverty, often noted by historians, was a conceptual feature of the program, then, not a political bug.

The book's five chapters chart the rise, implementation, and contestation of the community action idea. Modeled on both a Progressive-era template of neighborhood organizing, as well as community development strategies that had gained popularity among social scientists after World War II, the community action program seemed to liberal policymakers an ideal vehicle for enhancing the participation of the poor in American democracy and consumer capitalism. What those policymakers did not anticipate, however, was the extent to which the technocratic ethos of managed “self-help” would collide with the popular impulse of “self-determination” then animating liberation movements in an era of decolonization. The book illustrates the consequences of this collision for the program's architects and its presumed beneficiaries. In particular, Goldstein shows that the liberal state underestimated the long-term impact of altering the relationship between grassroots organizations and municipal governments. Native Americans seeking tribal sovereignty, Puerto Ricans in New York in search of political influence, the Young Lords and Black Panthers members who appealed to the international community in their battles against the US government all saw community action as a tool they could use to achieve some measure of political power. In this way, Goldstein's refreshing study reveals that the program had a far greater impact on the politics of the era than Moynihan's shopworn conclusions suggest.

This fine book does possess a few flaws, some of which might constrain its use in the classroom. First, Goldstein pays fairly little attention to the people who actually “rediscovered” poverty in the postwar period, at both the elite and grassroots levels. He is perhaps relying on his reader's preexisting knowledge of men and women like John Collier, Sargent Shriver, Johnnie Tillmon, and LaDonna Harris. But, as much of his argument rests on how ideas about “community,” “self-help,” and “self-determination” changed over time, the book could provide more context with which to understand the moment and the people who made it. Second, considering the now inconceivable enthusiasm that many of the figures in Goldstein's study expressed for a national guaranteed minimum income, he gives us little explanation of where this idea fits into his larger story. Richard Nixon (guided by Moynihan) sent a guaranteed-income proposal to Capitol Hill in 1969. The idea had been pursued, as Goldstein mentions, by various grassroots organizations on the left as well. Goldstein relegates this fascinating case to the margins of his narrative, a somewhat odd choice given the care with which he addresses other complexities. Finally, the writing can be abstruse. Subjects sometimes get lost in Goldstein's sentences, occasionally making it difficult to understand the subtle distinctions he is exploring. It is a minor weakness, perhaps, but one that limits the accessibility of this otherwise topically engaging piece of scholarship.

These small critiques aside, Poverty in Common's careful attention to the interstices of the theories and practices of the War on Poverty allows us to break free of quite a few of the “maximum feasible misunderstandings” that have obscured the history of postwar American liberalism for far too long.