Unfortunately, most of the hostile academic responses to Lewis’s culture of poverty concept have limited themselves to contradicting Lewis’s empirical assertions,rather than to critiquing theoretically his psychological reductionism, his sloppy use of the culture concept, and his failure to link in a dynamic manner macrostructural political and economic forces—including
gender power relations—to ideology,culture,and individual values (Valentine 1968, Stack 1974;for
a political economy exception, see Katz 1989; for a feminist literary criticism exception, see Franco 1989). The bulk of the negative reaction hinges on a political concern for replacing the negative imagery of Lewis’s painful but expressive ethnographic portraits of the
everyday suffering of urbanized families, with positive images of the worthy poor, struggling for upward mobility against all odds. A late 1990s rehabilitating of
the culture of poverty concept from a Marxist perspective
dismissed the virulence of the US progressive
reaction against the culture of poverty concept as a
sectarian ‘ultra Bolshevism’ that swept the New Left
when the general public was drifting ideologically to
the Right following the War on Poverty. This precipitated
a ‘fruitless game of radical one-upmanship’
among frustrated intellectuals, who were completely
marginal to public political discourse, and who chose
instead to devote their energies to proving their
dedication to protecting the image of the poor (Harvey
and Reed 1996). More importantly, the urgent righteousness
of the anti-culture of poverty social science
literature is comparable to the polemics against
Moynihan’s 1967 patriarchal attribution of the ‘tangle
of pathology’ in the black family as being the central
cause for the persistence of poverty among urban
African-Americans (Rainwater and Yancey 1967)