Postmodern dialectic of social care

Abstract

In contemporary literature concerning public social care a clearly critical trend emphasising the weaknesses and shortcomings of this care is noticeable. There are authors (Michel Foucault, Lech Witkowski) who even claim that social care has transformed into its opposite - instead of helping the poor it excludes them. This current of thought also includes reservations, expressed by many social workers, as to whether the institutional optimism of the law of social care is adequate for the practice of providing the care. In the text I take up these themes and look fortheir intellectual and moral roots. A starting point for my work is two Enlightenment models, British and Continental, and their different sensitivity to social issues. I demonstrate, following a contemporary American philosopher of ideas, Gertrude Himmelfarb, how the two models were created and transformed. I concentrate on the Continental model, which has also been adopted by the Polish social care system. I highlight milestones in the development of the model - Marxism, critical theory and postmodernism. In my analyses, I aim at showing what the postmodern social care dialectic consists of and whether it is possible to overcome it.