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Originally published: London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2014.
This book critiques and extends the analysis of power in the classic, Who Rules America?, on the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication in 1967—and through its subsequent editions. The chapters, written especially for this book by twelve sociologists and political scientists, provide fresh insights and new findings on many contemporary topics, among them the concerted attempt to privatize public schools; foreign policy and the growing role of the military-industrial component of the power elite; the successes and failures of union challenges to the power elite; the ongoing and increasingly global battles of a major sector of agribusiness; and the surprising details of how those who hold to the egalitarian values of social democracy were able to tip the scales in a bitter conflict within the power elite itself on a crucial banking reform in the aftermath of the Great Recession. These social scientists thereby point the way forward in the study of power, not just in the United States, but globally. A brief introductory chapter situates Who Rules America? within the context of the most visible theories of power over the past fifty years—pluralism, Marxism, Millsian elite theory, and historical institutionalism. Then, a chapter by G. William Domhoff, the author of Who Rules America?, takes us behind the scenes on how the original version was researched and written, tracing the evolution of the book in terms of new concepts and research discoveries by Domhoff himself, as well as many other power structure researchers, through the 2014 seventh edition. Readers will find differences of opinion and analysis from chapter to chapter. The authors were encouraged to express their views independently and frankly. They do so in an admirable and useful fashion that will stimulate everyone’s thinking on these difficult and complex issues, setting the agenda for future studies of power.
Aeron Davis takes a close look at the state of elites today. He argues that the Brexit vote and 2017 election outcome are signs of a deeper leadership crisis that has been developing over decades. The great transformations of the 1980s onwards have not only upended societies, they have reshaped elite rule itself. Too many leaders today, regardless of intent, are ignorant, precarious, rootless and self-serving. Although richer, they have lost coherence, influence and control. Increasingly, they are just reckless opportunists, getting what they can amid the chaos they have created. Their failings are not only damaging wider society, they are undermining the very foundations of the Establishment itself. The book, based on interviews with over 350 elite figures, asks: how did we end up producing the leaders that got us here and what can we do about it?
This book, prepared under the auspices of the IPSA Research Committee on Political Elites, focuses on the interpenetration between various types of elites. The contributions to this book reveal contrasting patterns of recruitment and selection in terms of career paths, visibility, influence, and power of different elite circles.
In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation. Tom Cutterham examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone. They also sought personal prestige and cultural preeminence. Cutterham describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's "lower sort" as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else. Lively and elegantly written, Gentlemen Revolutionaries demonstrates how these elites, far from giving up their attachment to gentility and privilege, recast the new republic in their own image.
The mythical 'demographic timebomb' can be defused through policies that reduce inequalities between and within generations.
The role of proprietorships or ‘private’ colonies in imperial development has not received the attention it deserves, notwithstanding recent scholarly emphasis on ‘state-building’. The continued use of these ‘private’ devices, even as early modern European nation-states grew more potent, is not only interesting, but is indeed normative though invariably missing from modern studies of empire. This collection provides in-depth analyses of the workings of the proprietorships themselves (rather than proprietary colonies) and in studies ranging from South Carolina to Nieuw Nederland to French West Africa to Brasil, broadens this discussion beyond British North America. Contributors include: Mickaël Augeron, Kenneth Banks, Sarah Barber, Philip Boucher, Olivier Caporossi, Leslie Choquette, David Dewar, Jaap Jacobs, Maxine N. Lurie, Debra A. Meyers, L.H. Roper, James O’Neil Spady, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Cécile Vidal, and Laurent Vidal.