Compassion

Compassion as social policy

THERESE JENNISSEN   REVIEWS   AUGUST 8, 2019

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  Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy

  Alvin Finkel
  Red Globe Press, 2019

Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy is the latest and most ambitious work of Canadian historian Alvin Finkel. It is an impressive book filled with rich detail and grounded in solid research. It is comprehensive and extremely well-organized and well-written.

In 306 pages Finkel appears to have accomplished the impossible. He chronicles how human beings have treated each other and particularly the most vulnerable members of society over the course of human history, from 200,000 BCE to the present day, and from around the world. He examines a multitude of factors that have contributed to the creation of compassion, or lack thereof. Finkel uses the term “social policy” as the main indicator of compassion. He argues that the histories of compassion and social policy cannot be separated from “histories of competition among social classes over the distribution of wealth and competition within elites over who has the right to provide social aid and in what form.”