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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question has made a comeback. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century maps out the linked crises across regions and countries and identifies the renewed and intensified Social Question as a labor issue above all. The volume includes discussions from every corner of the globe, focusing on American exceptionalism, Chinese repression, Indian exclusion, South African colonialism, democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, and other phenomena. The effects of capitalism dominating the world, the impact of the scarcity of waged work, and the degree to which the dispossessed poor bear the brunt of the crisis are all evaluated in this carefully curated volume. Both thorough and thoughtful, the book serves as collective effort to revive and reposition the Social Question, reconstructing its meaning and its politics in the world today.
A New Social Question: Capitalism, Socialism and Utopia brings together a selection of papers presented at the conference on “Capitalism and Socialism: Utopia, Globalization and Revolution” at New Harmony, Indiana, in 2014. New Harmony is best known as the site of industrialist Robert Owen’s experiment in communal living in 1825, and it was Owen’s legacy that drew scholars from across the Atlantic. Owen’s work and his experiment at New Harmony again have currency as the world looks back on the 2008 economic crisis and as “socialism,” seemingly banished with the failure of experiments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the last century has returned to the political and economic lexicon. As David Harvey, Thomas Piketty and Joyce Appleby have lately reminded us, capitalism, particularly the forms it has assumed since 1945, is probably exceptional, perhaps ephemeral, but also dynamic and resilient. If the Great Recession has derailed personal lives, destabilized economies and unnerved politicians, it has also reminded us that we have not reached the “end of history.” Where there was once a Social Question, there is now a New Social Question. This edited, multi-disciplinary volume will appeal to readers in political science, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, literature, communications and cultural studies, and to academic audiences in North America, Britain and elsewhere.
How social and intellectual changes undermine our justifications for the welfare state The welfare state has come under severe pressure internationally, partly for the well-known reasons of slowing economic growth and declining confidence in the public sector. According to the influential social theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, however, there is also a deeper and less familiar reason for the crisis of the welfare state. He shows here that a fundamental practical and philosophical justification for traditional welfare policies—that all citizens share equal risks—has been undermined by social and intellectual change. If we wish to achieve the goals of social solidarity and civic equality for which the welfare state was founded, Rosanvallon argues, we must radically rethink social programs. Rosanvallon begins by tracing the history of the welfare state and its founding premise that risks, especially the risks of illness and unemployment, are equally distributed and unpredictable. He shows that this idea has become untenable because of economic diversification and advances in statistical and risk analysis. It is truer than ever before—and far more susceptible to analysis—that some individuals will face much greater risks than others because of their jobs and lifestyle choices. Rosanvallon argues that social policies must be more narrowly targeted. And he draws on evidence from around the world, in particular France and the United States, to show that such programs as unemployment insurance and workfare could better reflect individual needs by, for example, making more explicit use of contracts between the providers and receivers of benefits. His arguments have broad implications for welfare programs everywhere and for our understanding of citizenship in modern democracies and economies.