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"This book demonstrates how ideological dogmatism could be potentially dangerous in policy-making processes. Specifically, it considers Thomas Sowell's constant disparagement of African American culture on the one hand, and his call for an immediate termination of preferential policies on the other as an intent to penalize a community that is already trapped in a double bind where the egalitarian promises of civic republicanism conflict with denigration and denial. As the book shows, this is eventually represented as an impending threat to the very ideal of an ethnically integrated society."--Cover page 4

In this article, it is argued that the progressive reform agenda of the mid-twentieth century liberal elite might have more effectively served the economic interests of non-white minorities had this generation of well-intentioned policy-makers been more attentive to the conservative criticism of the limits and pitfalls of their policies. As they turned preferential treatment into one of the mainstays of the national government's anti-poverty strategies, and by supporting a new "welfare philosophy" that was essentially based on service provision, the social liberals in power during the sixties and seventies transformed government assistance into an even less popular approach to socioeconomic disparities. While they focused their vision of social progress on group advancement, they ended up further compromising their egalitarian agenda as their political choices and decisions gradually lost much of their early popular appeal. This liberal elite, it is argued, laid the foundation for a new egalitarian paradigm which presents racial integration through preferential treatment - or race-based affirmative action - as an ideal solution to the socioeconomic underperformance of disadvantaged non-white minorities, causing the former to definitively fall into disfavor.Keywords: Affirmative action, Laissez-faire, Public policy, US ethnic minorities, welfare