<i>The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941–1968</i> by Sheyda F. A. Jahanbani

This is an original and seminal work that explores the intellectual origins and strategies of what the author refers to as America’s “global war on poverty” (3). In it, the author posits that liberal intellectuals in postwar America argued that American wealth and power could be used as a way to combat poverty throughout the globe. Thus, Jahanbani’s book links recent scholarship on America’s war on poverty to works exploring the American empire in the postwar years.Jahanbani structures her book around the writings and careers of key liberal thinkers who contributed fundamental ideas to the foundation of the global war on poverty—John Collier, Oscar Lewis, John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington, and Sargent Shriver. Their ideas, in her narrative, formed what eventually became America’s global war on poverty.Focus on these liberal intellectuals is not new. For decades, scholars have noted the influence of such ideas and writings on the origins of President Johnson’s war on poverty. What sets Jahanbani’s discussion of these men and their ideas apart, though, is her argument that they were focused not on poverty in America, but poverty in the world. And, concomitantly, she notes that these intellectuals believed that America, as the preeminent postwar power, had the duty and responsibility to share its wealth and resources to address poverty outside of the United States. Key to these intellectuals’ work was the notion of the central role of development in addressing the world’s poverty. To these thinkers, poverty was the result of underdevelopment. The poor were essentially the same wherever they were—regardless of geographical location, they were the victims of underdevelopment. The United States had a duty to bring its abundant resources to fight poverty throughout the world through the development of people and communities.The culmination of these ideas in action, and the fulcrum of Jahanbani’s work, were the Peace Corps and the Volunteers in Service to America (vista), both headed by Shriver. These programs, for Jahanbani, clearly brought to fruition the notion of American responsibility to end poverty everywhere in the world.One of the many strengths of this work is Jahanbani’s skilled use of visual images, both photographs and films created by and about vista, to create one complex and compelling story. According to the narrative of these visuals, virtuous young American volunteers were bringing American knowledge and empathy to all corners of the world in an effort to end poverty. Jahanbani ends her book with an incisive and direct assessment of how and why the global war on poverty failed—it was, essentially, a moral failure of liberalism and its focus on poverty and affluence rather than on justice and injustice.This is a beautifully written, impressive, and original work that should be of interest to political scientists, historians, and other scholars who study American postwar foreign policy or domestic policy and to scholars who write about the American empire. It is one of the most important works on America’s antipoverty efforts in recent years.