A lively and rigorous historical exploration of how a scientific idea from the cybernetic prehistory of AI has informed radical politics—and vice versa.Politically, “self-organization” is all about bottom-up, spontaneously democratic processes. It’s the term we reach for to describe massive social movements that seem to erupt out of nowhere, everywhere and all at once. Meanwhile, in the sciences, “self-organization” names the way living organisms, emergent systems ...

This collection takes on the call issued by reviewers of The American Way for a critical application of Carville Earle's framework to more geographical examples of political and economic shifts in America's past. The essays illustrate changes in U.S. settlement, development, and political structure through the lens of the restructuring of the American economy and society over approximately fifty year cycles of crisis and recovery. They demonstrate the extension of American's spher...

For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our "mode...

“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates“A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.”—The Atlantic“Extraordinary…Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create ...

Walter E. Williams applies an economic analysis to the problems black Americans have faced in the past and still face in the present to show that that free-market resource allocation, as opposed to political allocation, is in the best interests of minorities. He debunks many common labor market myths and reveals how excessive government regulation and the minimum-wage law have imposed incalculable harm on the most disadvantaged members of our society.

Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the U.S. welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare ...

Seeking to reclaim a history that has remained largely ignored by most historians, this dramatic and stirring account examines each of the definitive American cooperative movements for social change—farmer, union, consumer, and communalist—that have been all but erased from collective memory.Focusing far beyond one particular era, organization, leader, or form of cooperation, For All the People documents the multigenerational struggle of the American working people for soc...

With welfare reform a burning political issue, this special anniversary edition of the classic history of welfare in America has been revised and updated to include the latest bipartisan debates on how to end welfare as we know it.”In the Shadow of the Poorhouse examines the origins of social welfare, both public and private, from the days of the colonial poorhouse through the current tragedy of the homeless. The book explains why such a highly criticized system persists. Katz ex...

Uncovers the systemic problems that expose poor communities to environmental hazardsFrom St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the ‘paths of least resistance,’ there are many hazardous waste and toxic facil...

American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that t...

A book that rewrites the history of American prosperity and inequalityUnequal Gains offers a radically new understanding of the economic evolution of the United States, providing a complete picture of the uneven progress of America from colonial times to today.While other economic historians base their accounts on American wealth, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson focus instead on income—and the result is a bold reassessment of the American econ...

Why major changes to America's social safety net have always required bold presidential leadershipAmericans like to think that they look after their own, especially in times of hardship. Particularly for the Great Depression and the Great Society eras, the collective memory is one of solidarity and compassion for the less fortunate. Who Cares? challenges this story by examining opinion polls and letters to presidents from average citizens. This evidence, s...