Roberta Ferrari holds a PhD in History of Political Thought. She is a research fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna and teaches History of Political Thought at the University of Florence. Her research focuses on socialist thought in England and Ireland and on the concept of planning in Europe, the USSR, and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and in the 1950s and 1960s. She has published Beatrice Potter e il capitalismo senza civiltà (Beatrice Potter and Capitalism without Civilization) (Rome: Viella, 2017) and, with Michele Cento, Il socialismo ai margini. Classe e nazione nel Sud Italia e in Irlanda (Socialism on the Margins: Class and Nation in Southern Italy and Ireland) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2018), and she is now writing a book on planning as a political concept.

Analyzing Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society policies, especially the War on Poverty, the talk examines the transformations liberalism faced with the emergence of social organizations and movements whose radicalism challenged the New Deal compromise. During this crisis - when US liberal thinkers and policymakers believed they could govern social forces by finally addressing racial divisions - American liberalism sought to free itself from the political burden of the New Deal order and its model of social planning. It did so to respond to both the critiques of social movements and conservative attacks, but above all to recenter the ethics of the individual against what it perceived as the radical, uncontrolled expansion of collective forces. These forces had used the Community Action Program both to access federal resources and to challenge the social order that had long managed and preserved racist, patriarchal, and class hierarchies.