Towards a history of critical traditions in Australian social work

This article situates the social work and human service professions in a long view of history, born of the clash between liberal-individualist and socialist-collectivist responses to the social miseries of modern, western capitalism. In this long view, critical social work is conceived as heir to struggles for social justice that predate but are amplified in modernity. In Australia, as elsewhere, liberal-individualism was dominant in social work’s beginnings but always amid currents of social reform, which significantly impacted the social welfare occupations in the early 1970’s. This radicalism, sought not only to relieve people’s suffering but to change the social conditions engendering it. The radical social work of the 1970’s has subsequently developed in diverse ways under the successive influences of Marxist, feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, postmodern and various other approaches to constitute the diverse family of critical social work today.