DOING GOOD springs from a series of symposia, featuring three humanists and a civil libertarian and held before audiences of social service professionals. The book aims to demonstrate not only the feasibility but also the usefulness of joining the humanities with social policy .... In substantive terms, these essays are an attempt to clarify how it is that, particularly in the United States, dependency and benevolence have become problematic subjects .... We believe that the perspectives offered here do represent, modestly put, a reformulation, or more ambitiously, a fundamental redefinition of the assumptions and practices that guide social policy toward the dependent....