Welfare State Change: Towards a Third Way? Edited by Jane Lewis and Rebecca Surender. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 248p. $99.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

We do occasionally reach moments at which important bodies of academic scholarship have crystallized into a coherent shape, and at which the political practices to which they are addressed have been with us long enough to permit the construction of generalizations of value. Those are the moments at which high-quality stock takings are often essential. We are at such a moment with the literature on the “Third Way” and on its social policy, and in Jane Lewis and Rebecca Surender's Welfare State Change we have just such a stock taking.