What do you think?
Rate this book
The Politics of Disablement (Critical Texts in Social Work and the Welfare State) by Michael Oliver
This book, by an author who is himself disabled, looks at the individualised and medicalised views of disability and describes the way they have been produced in capitalist society. Further, it then analyses the possibilities for achieving political change within this current era of late capitalism and the significance of the emergent disability movement as part of this process of change.
Paperback
First published August 1, 1990
4 people are currently reading
212 people want to read
About the author
Michael Oliver
9 books10 followersMichael J. Oliver, born 3 Feb. 1945, is Professor of Disability Studies, at the University of Greenwich.
Formerly he taught in the School of Education Studies at Thames Polytechnic, in London.
Oliver is a disabled academic and political activist. He is a founding council member of the British Council of Disabled People. To date he holds the only professorship of disability studies in Britain. Oliver has published numerous books on disability issues.
Formerly he taught in the School of Education Studies at Thames Polytechnic, in London.
Oliver is a disabled academic and political activist. He is a founding council member of the British Council of Disabled People. To date he holds the only professorship of disability studies in Britain. Oliver has published numerous books on disability issues.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 20, 2011
This is the best book I have read that works through how disability is defined, constituted and perpetuated. Published in 1990, the text has not dated except with regard to the treatment of indigenous people as case studies in the book. There are some uncomfortable moments where Oliver cites examples of 'disability' from indigenous communities that are disconnected from contextual, historical and political concerns.
However as a key text to understand disability as an ideology rather than a seemingly neutral description, this is a fine entry into the field.
However as a key text to understand disability as an ideology rather than a seemingly neutral description, this is a fine entry into the field.
October 12, 2020
Published in 1990 and written by a sociologist being a tetraplegic himself, here's a fascinating book for its historical interest. It's very academic, tough at times, heavy on sociology, with a whole focus on Britain, but nevertheless engaging enough to demonstrate a clear shift in thinking when it comes to disability -from the so-called medical model to the so-called social model.
The philosophy behind some of the various Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s back in the USA had spilled across the Atlantic, and disabled people were not spared by the rise of such new social movements. Thank goodness for that! At long last speaking for themselves, they became empowered enough to challenge and reject the then prevalent views of what it meant to be disabled, and the negative impacts such labels carried upon their bearers. To hell with what the author here refers to as the 'personal tragedy theory', whereas the 'handicapped' were seen as victims to support as a burden, even if a compassionate (read: patronising and condescending) one. And welcome instead to what he calls the 'social theory of disability', whereas it's not the individuals anymore who are blamed for their fate, but, society, whose features and structure (e.g. education, transports, housing, employments, services, care...) are so inadequate they are disabling. Disabilities are not an individual problem; they are a societal one.
Such shift in thinking was radical. It's also a massive eye opener especially for people who, like me, are not disabled (or do not consider themselves to be so). The academic discussions are tough, and it might require great empathy to get the point, but stigma and prejudices are still pretty much prevalent. For instance, did you know that an impairment is not necessarily a disability? This may seem like fussing around definition, but then again definitions are important -they set the tone for policies implemented to address the issues. And, when it comes to policies, it's difficult to don't read this book without being baffled by its ongoing relevance, despite our shift in thinking ever since the 1980s. His criticisms are indeed far ranging.
He targets the views usually prevalent on the political Left, bringing up the classical arguments warning against the dangers of relying on a welfare state as a solution-fit-for-all. As he points indeed, especially when targeting 'special' policies to help disabled into the workforce or rejecting the idea of a National Disability Income, such humanitarian measures may be compassionate in intent, but, without embracing a new view of what it means to be disabled, the State turned nanny can potentially result in exclusion and disempowerment:
'By packaging and selling them as a special cause, the idea that there is something different about disabled workers is reinforced and may be exclusionary rather than inclusionary.'
'such a scheme [a National Disability Income] implies the paying of one group of people a sufficient income for not working to enable them to have a quality of life comparable to another group of people who do work... This, of course, has enormous implications for any system... and indeed for its ideological underpinning which emphasises the value of those who do work and denigrates those who do not.'
He also targets the views usually prevalent on the political Right, for instance the idea that privatisations are de facto a good thing for people since, by opening up markets, they will empower consumers to have a choice. This may have back then sounded like a great idea indeed (Thatcher was still PM), especially for groups of people who until then had been completely disempowered; but, then again, he insist such privatisations will be useless if not made with the interest of the people concerned at their core:
'This Government was committed to reducing public expenditure, minimising the role of the state and privatising a whole range of services. Throughout the eighties, this has had profound implications for disabled people; inadequate existing services have become even more inadequate, specific political goals like a national disability income and antidiscrimination legislation are further away than ever, and some rights and benefits have been removed altogether.'
Thirty years later, aren't we still there? Sure, as the author foresaw in here too, the job market has evolved and, by its new nature (IT and services over physical manufacturing work) has become more inclusive of people with various impairments. But isn't the derelict state of the health and social care sector, a sector which has been continuously sold off more and more by every single government which succeeded Thatcher, a sad testimony of a terrible failure in the system?
Here's a dry book if you're not that keen on sociological essay, but, illustrating the radical shift in thinking which characterised the disability movement over the past few decades, I cannot but recommend it highly to anyone interested in the topic. The fact some of it criticism are still relevant these days (is a welfare state really compassionate? Are privatisations really a way to empower consumers?...) makes it in fact all the more thought provoking.
The philosophy behind some of the various Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s back in the USA had spilled across the Atlantic, and disabled people were not spared by the rise of such new social movements. Thank goodness for that! At long last speaking for themselves, they became empowered enough to challenge and reject the then prevalent views of what it meant to be disabled, and the negative impacts such labels carried upon their bearers. To hell with what the author here refers to as the 'personal tragedy theory', whereas the 'handicapped' were seen as victims to support as a burden, even if a compassionate (read: patronising and condescending) one. And welcome instead to what he calls the 'social theory of disability', whereas it's not the individuals anymore who are blamed for their fate, but, society, whose features and structure (e.g. education, transports, housing, employments, services, care...) are so inadequate they are disabling. Disabilities are not an individual problem; they are a societal one.
Such shift in thinking was radical. It's also a massive eye opener especially for people who, like me, are not disabled (or do not consider themselves to be so). The academic discussions are tough, and it might require great empathy to get the point, but stigma and prejudices are still pretty much prevalent. For instance, did you know that an impairment is not necessarily a disability? This may seem like fussing around definition, but then again definitions are important -they set the tone for policies implemented to address the issues. And, when it comes to policies, it's difficult to don't read this book without being baffled by its ongoing relevance, despite our shift in thinking ever since the 1980s. His criticisms are indeed far ranging.
He targets the views usually prevalent on the political Left, bringing up the classical arguments warning against the dangers of relying on a welfare state as a solution-fit-for-all. As he points indeed, especially when targeting 'special' policies to help disabled into the workforce or rejecting the idea of a National Disability Income, such humanitarian measures may be compassionate in intent, but, without embracing a new view of what it means to be disabled, the State turned nanny can potentially result in exclusion and disempowerment:
'By packaging and selling them as a special cause, the idea that there is something different about disabled workers is reinforced and may be exclusionary rather than inclusionary.'
'such a scheme [a National Disability Income] implies the paying of one group of people a sufficient income for not working to enable them to have a quality of life comparable to another group of people who do work... This, of course, has enormous implications for any system... and indeed for its ideological underpinning which emphasises the value of those who do work and denigrates those who do not.'
He also targets the views usually prevalent on the political Right, for instance the idea that privatisations are de facto a good thing for people since, by opening up markets, they will empower consumers to have a choice. This may have back then sounded like a great idea indeed (Thatcher was still PM), especially for groups of people who until then had been completely disempowered; but, then again, he insist such privatisations will be useless if not made with the interest of the people concerned at their core:
'This Government was committed to reducing public expenditure, minimising the role of the state and privatising a whole range of services. Throughout the eighties, this has had profound implications for disabled people; inadequate existing services have become even more inadequate, specific political goals like a national disability income and antidiscrimination legislation are further away than ever, and some rights and benefits have been removed altogether.'
Thirty years later, aren't we still there? Sure, as the author foresaw in here too, the job market has evolved and, by its new nature (IT and services over physical manufacturing work) has become more inclusive of people with various impairments. But isn't the derelict state of the health and social care sector, a sector which has been continuously sold off more and more by every single government which succeeded Thatcher, a sad testimony of a terrible failure in the system?
Here's a dry book if you're not that keen on sociological essay, but, illustrating the radical shift in thinking which characterised the disability movement over the past few decades, I cannot but recommend it highly to anyone interested in the topic. The fact some of it criticism are still relevant these days (is a welfare state really compassionate? Are privatisations really a way to empower consumers?...) makes it in fact all the more thought provoking.
April 30, 2025
Compared to the other, sexier social justice domains, it seems that disability studies always gets left in the dust. This bothers me because disability is one of the most potentially universal forms of discrimination/limitation that we may experience. As we age, as we stay active, the possibility of disability is always there. Because of the relative unpopularity of disability studies, much of the applicable theory merely borrows from other domains like feminism and antiracism, which makes for (to me) unhelpful approaches. It shouldn't surprise us that this is how things go in theory, because in praxis it's often the same: we half-ass some solutions for people with disabilities, then expect them to pat us on our back when we do the bare minimum, i.e. when we finally acknowledge they exist and maybe even start to help them.
As a potential antidote to this apathy and ignorance, Oliver outlines some of the applicable history of how we got the category of "disabled," as well as some generally helpful paradoxes that can help move us past a superficial view of disability. In general, there are two approaches to disability: "the personal tragedy theory" and the "social oppression theory;" these parallel the antiracist move toward social and systemic roots of problems, rather than getting stuck on the inter-personal level. Compared to antiracist rhetoric which over-relies on statistical analysis, able-bodied society's culpability is extraordinarily clear. In the case of race or even to a degree with gender, there's ways you can dance around the issue, blaming culture or biology or history; but with disability, the brute fact of "impairment" (the physical limitation itself) can't be argued away. The problem is that, because most of us often don't think about disability, we miss the parallel problem of "disablement," that is, how society imposes disability on people who are impaired and exacerbates the problems caused by impairment. When that aspect is forgotten, the onus is placed on the person with the disability, instead of on the society that is so stingy it can't bear to make things accessible to everyone.
Though things weren't universally better for people with disabilities in the past, at least they didn't have the same social stigma that we do under capitalism, where they're seen as "leeches" unless they can find some company that is willing to "accommodate" them. Before the era of pathological individualization, people with disabilities could fill more fluid roles in the community. Now, after modernization and industrialization, we have this weird ableist assumption that every individual must be self-sustaining and independent, despite leaving behind most people with disabilities. Capitalism has absolutely no incentive to accommodate people with disabilities unless those very people (or their allies) demand change.
The only way capitalism knows how to "deal" with disability is through medicalization; on the face of it, this seems like the obvious "solution:" "fix" their "broken" bodies. But the problem with this is that this puts all the responsibility on the person with a disability, rather than on the rest of society to change how they interact with disability. It allows us to keep our fragile egos intact while absolutely destroying the sense of self-worth of people with disabilities. Sure, there are some helpful medical interventions, but the problem is what to do with all the people who A) there are no medical interventions for, or B) whose medical interventions fail (failed transplants, surgeries, lack of technology, lack of funds/insurance, etc.). In other words, we need to account for "our failure to learn how to communicate with them, not their inability to communicate with us."
The nice thing about Oliver's approach is that, while it does unsettle our able-bodied assumptions, he doesn't approach things dogmatically or exclusively. Unlike the antiracists, he doesn't deny that it's also an individual problem; he merely argues for the addition of a social approach to the interpersonal approach. Both have their places, and the latter certainly has its own limitations. He even explicitly says you don't have to be a marxist to grant the problems capitalism has with addressing disability, nor does he want to paint the pre-capitalistic world as some sort of disability utopia. It is primarily thanks to capitalism that we even have a term "disabled" in the first place; basically, when "dealing with" groups of people who couldn't or wouldn't work, governments needed ways to differentiate between the two. "Children, the sick, the insane, "defectives", and the "aged and infirm" were in the former group, so if you weren't in those groups you were considered simply unwilling to work.
As mentioned earlier, this then leads naturally to the medicalization of disability, which always is a rather political thing. We have plenty of examples of non-diseases being medicalized (alcoholism especially) and other things originally seen as "diseases" (such as homosexuality) suddenly being considered "normal" behavior. Bringing this more explicitly into the realm of disability, the same impairment (inability to walk) may be seen as a disability if it was something caused by a birth deformity or severe car accident (loss of limb), as opposed to cases where it is not a disability but merely an injury, as with less severe accidents. Thus even when we consider this domain of disability to be the most directly linked to physical, objective realities, there are still historical and social aspects to take into consideration.
I recently wrote a book chapter on disability in film, and I learned a lot reading various disability studies articles as research. The biggest thing I learned was the levels of awareness people can have about this topic, especially in media. It's shocking the number of movies over the past few decades that have won academy awards for able-bodied actors playing disabled characters. Tobin Seibers calls this "disability drag," since it's a double sort of performance. Some films, especially those which address disability in more indirect ways, represent it in a more constructive direction, but we should be wary about how disability is represented in most films. It's often merely the butt of a joke or a plot point (thus something to be overcome, not lived with or celebrated); I don't think any disability activist wants for disability in film what race and gender in film have become (token black characters, gender-swapped leads, etc.). Instead, I think the main thing is simply acknowledging the nuances of impairment and disablement; by that, I mean that not all blind people are walking around with sunglasses and walking sticks. In one of the movies I analyzed, Proof (1991), we only ever stayed at that superficial level. Even in terms of plot, we never progressed past the "personal tragedy theory;" despite the blind main character being repeatedly sexually assaulted by his maid, he simply fired her and (we must assume) later started looking for another one. Rather than changing anything about his place in society and his over-reliance upon able-bodied people, he simply swapped the able-bodied person he was reliant upon. This was only the second-most-disturbing part of the movie; the worst was near the end when Russell Crowe's character, an able-bodied young man, lectured Hugo Weaving's blind character about trust, stating that we all have to trust others from time to time. The problem is that the kinds of trust aren't even comparable between a seeing versus a blind person. It's only once we able-bodied people take a chance and soften our ego that we can start to grasp the ramifications of a social theory of disability.
As a potential antidote to this apathy and ignorance, Oliver outlines some of the applicable history of how we got the category of "disabled," as well as some generally helpful paradoxes that can help move us past a superficial view of disability. In general, there are two approaches to disability: "the personal tragedy theory" and the "social oppression theory;" these parallel the antiracist move toward social and systemic roots of problems, rather than getting stuck on the inter-personal level. Compared to antiracist rhetoric which over-relies on statistical analysis, able-bodied society's culpability is extraordinarily clear. In the case of race or even to a degree with gender, there's ways you can dance around the issue, blaming culture or biology or history; but with disability, the brute fact of "impairment" (the physical limitation itself) can't be argued away. The problem is that, because most of us often don't think about disability, we miss the parallel problem of "disablement," that is, how society imposes disability on people who are impaired and exacerbates the problems caused by impairment. When that aspect is forgotten, the onus is placed on the person with the disability, instead of on the society that is so stingy it can't bear to make things accessible to everyone.
Though things weren't universally better for people with disabilities in the past, at least they didn't have the same social stigma that we do under capitalism, where they're seen as "leeches" unless they can find some company that is willing to "accommodate" them. Before the era of pathological individualization, people with disabilities could fill more fluid roles in the community. Now, after modernization and industrialization, we have this weird ableist assumption that every individual must be self-sustaining and independent, despite leaving behind most people with disabilities. Capitalism has absolutely no incentive to accommodate people with disabilities unless those very people (or their allies) demand change.
The only way capitalism knows how to "deal" with disability is through medicalization; on the face of it, this seems like the obvious "solution:" "fix" their "broken" bodies. But the problem with this is that this puts all the responsibility on the person with a disability, rather than on the rest of society to change how they interact with disability. It allows us to keep our fragile egos intact while absolutely destroying the sense of self-worth of people with disabilities. Sure, there are some helpful medical interventions, but the problem is what to do with all the people who A) there are no medical interventions for, or B) whose medical interventions fail (failed transplants, surgeries, lack of technology, lack of funds/insurance, etc.). In other words, we need to account for "our failure to learn how to communicate with them, not their inability to communicate with us."
The nice thing about Oliver's approach is that, while it does unsettle our able-bodied assumptions, he doesn't approach things dogmatically or exclusively. Unlike the antiracists, he doesn't deny that it's also an individual problem; he merely argues for the addition of a social approach to the interpersonal approach. Both have their places, and the latter certainly has its own limitations. He even explicitly says you don't have to be a marxist to grant the problems capitalism has with addressing disability, nor does he want to paint the pre-capitalistic world as some sort of disability utopia. It is primarily thanks to capitalism that we even have a term "disabled" in the first place; basically, when "dealing with" groups of people who couldn't or wouldn't work, governments needed ways to differentiate between the two. "Children, the sick, the insane, "defectives", and the "aged and infirm" were in the former group, so if you weren't in those groups you were considered simply unwilling to work.
As mentioned earlier, this then leads naturally to the medicalization of disability, which always is a rather political thing. We have plenty of examples of non-diseases being medicalized (alcoholism especially) and other things originally seen as "diseases" (such as homosexuality) suddenly being considered "normal" behavior. Bringing this more explicitly into the realm of disability, the same impairment (inability to walk) may be seen as a disability if it was something caused by a birth deformity or severe car accident (loss of limb), as opposed to cases where it is not a disability but merely an injury, as with less severe accidents. Thus even when we consider this domain of disability to be the most directly linked to physical, objective realities, there are still historical and social aspects to take into consideration.
I recently wrote a book chapter on disability in film, and I learned a lot reading various disability studies articles as research. The biggest thing I learned was the levels of awareness people can have about this topic, especially in media. It's shocking the number of movies over the past few decades that have won academy awards for able-bodied actors playing disabled characters. Tobin Seibers calls this "disability drag," since it's a double sort of performance. Some films, especially those which address disability in more indirect ways, represent it in a more constructive direction, but we should be wary about how disability is represented in most films. It's often merely the butt of a joke or a plot point (thus something to be overcome, not lived with or celebrated); I don't think any disability activist wants for disability in film what race and gender in film have become (token black characters, gender-swapped leads, etc.). Instead, I think the main thing is simply acknowledging the nuances of impairment and disablement; by that, I mean that not all blind people are walking around with sunglasses and walking sticks. In one of the movies I analyzed, Proof (1991), we only ever stayed at that superficial level. Even in terms of plot, we never progressed past the "personal tragedy theory;" despite the blind main character being repeatedly sexually assaulted by his maid, he simply fired her and (we must assume) later started looking for another one. Rather than changing anything about his place in society and his over-reliance upon able-bodied people, he simply swapped the able-bodied person he was reliant upon. This was only the second-most-disturbing part of the movie; the worst was near the end when Russell Crowe's character, an able-bodied young man, lectured Hugo Weaving's blind character about trust, stating that we all have to trust others from time to time. The problem is that the kinds of trust aren't even comparable between a seeing versus a blind person. It's only once we able-bodied people take a chance and soften our ego that we can start to grasp the ramifications of a social theory of disability.
March 14, 2012
I recommend this book! I had to return it and haven't been able to get back to it to finish, but hope to in future. I think it would be a great book for an Inclusive Excellence discussion.
February 2, 2025
Punchy + accessible sociology that’s both optimistic and grounded in “real world” of political-economic systems
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews