Illiberal Reformers

Placeholder author icon
By Thomas C. Leonard

Published Feb. 17, 2016

Illiberal Reformers examines how the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as inferiors — immigrants, African Americans, women, and “mental defectives,” whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman — but to exclude them.Thomas C. Leonard is a research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton and a lecturer in the Department of Economics.

Paw in print

Image
The January 2026 cover of PAW, featuring a man and a woman and the headline "Empower Couple."
The Latest Issue

January 2026

Giving big with Kwanza Jones ’93 and José E. Feliciano ’94; Elizabeth Tsurkov freed; small town wonderers.