Selected Titles on
Capitalism and Its Discontents
The Society of Equals
“In a rich and illuminating work of political theory and historical interpretation, Pierre Rosanvallon traces the rise and fall of the ideal of equality, from the American and French Revolutions to the present. And he argues for reviving equality as a moral and political project. The ‘society of equals’ he favors is less about redistribution than about recovering commonality as the basis of social relations. At a time when the welfare state has lost its capacity to inspire, Rosanvallon, one of Europe’s most distinguished political theorists, offers a way of recasting the case for a more equal society.”—Michael J. Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression
2013 Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize, History of Economics Society • 2013 Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians • Book of Exceptional Merit, 2013 S-USIH Book Award, Society for Intellectual History • An American Spectator Christmas Gift Pick, 2012
“Capacious and quietly ambitious, offering a dramatic retelling of the intellectual history of the postwar revival of free-market ideas, and it is an excellent example of what can be gained when intellectual history doesn’t focus exclusively on individuals… Burgin’s account of the evolution of the Mont Pelerin Society is a study of the complexity of ideological change, of the ways that ideas conceived in one context can acquire a very different hue over time. It is an immensely rich, careful and thoughtful history that captures the range of opinion within a group of people who are too often seen as having marched in lockstep.”—Kim Phillips-Fein, The Nation
Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
2013 Avery O. Craven Award, Organization of American Historians • 2013 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians • 2013 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians
“Levy sets himself the task of writing a history of economic and social risk in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries and, along the way, of showing that big government didn’t just come from nowhere. It is an indispensable absorber, he suggests, of the shocks of the free market… Freaks of Fortune is a formidable work of scholarship—hats off to the author for the depth and breadth of his research.”—James Grant, The Wall Street Journal
The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite
“Offers a compelling history of how the American corporate elite reconciled itself to the New Deal, and then, in the aftermath of World War II, signed on to a vision of America in which government played a muscular and essential role in steering the economy and underwriting the well-being of the middle class… Mizruchi’s secret history of a time when corporate America believed in government and in paying taxes—and the riffs he adds to the more familiar tune of how business became more conservative—are assembled here in the service of a larger argument: This right-hand turn by the country’s corporate elite has been bad for business and bad for America. Mizruchi describes a business elite that has become fragmented, irrelevant, and powerless to solve the problems—like mounting national debt, decaying infrastructure, and failing schools—that, in the long-term, will hurt the vested interests of corporate America.”—Chrystia Freeland, Democracy
Making the European Monetary Union
“The value of Making the European Monetary Union is in showing how [the] ideological swerves played out in real meeting rooms, with real finance ministers, central bankers and heads of government. Commissioned by the Bank for International Settlements and the European Central Bank (ECB), the book benefits from unprecedented access to both institutions’ archives. James’s fly-on-the-wall accounts of committee meetings and central-bank deliberations offer illuminating detail about how the precise wording of important agreements came to be decided… James has produced a valuable companion to today’s headlines, a comprehensive primer on how Europe got to its unhappy state… Reading the book is like watching a horror film whose ending you know in advance. At every turn, you want to cry out, Stop!”—Raymond Zhong, The Wall Street Journal
The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty
2013 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, Political Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association • Co-Winner, 2013 Barrington Moore Book Award, Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association • Co-Winner, 2013 Viviana Zelizer Award, Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association
“This engrossing book provides an arresting answer to the questions of why America’s welfare state is so weak and why so many Americans live in poverty. Prasad forges an elegant argument using both historical and cross-national evidence to show that countries chose between two strategies for managing income distribution, welfare programs and consumer credit. By the 1940s the U.S. had chosen consumer credit, and has since been using ‘mortgage Keynesianism,’ which does nothing for the truly poor and invites economic volatility. A startling and ultimately convincing contribution to the most important debate of our times.”—Frank Dobbin, Harvard University
Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes
“Elegantly written and extremely thoughtful… This is not a technical economic tract; this is a book for someone who wants to understand how Keynes’ ideas and habits of thought fit together… Writing about someone like Keynes who personally wrote so much, so well, must be a daunting task. Backhouse and Bateman more than keep up, not by competing with Keynes, but by letting him speak, in all his many voices… He was not a man to be pinned down because he recognized that the world, which includes matters of economics as well as so much more, is neither simple, straightforward nor apprehensible by time-bound men armed with doctrines and dogmas. That alone is a lesson well worth revisiting regularly.”—Robert Teitelman, The Deal
The Age of Equality: The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2011 on Economic, Social, and Environmental Subjects
“The linking of history and sound economics in telling the story of the last two centuries (the author goes substantially beyond the twentieth-century emphasis of the title) is a terrific idea, and the application of different growth models in explaining twentieth-century growth in various institutional and political contexts is wonderful. The emphasis on equality and inequality is also very welcome and feeds into current and important contemporary concerns: does high inequality, especially in the U.S. and the U.K., jeopardize continued growth?”
—Harold James, Princeton University
The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy
A Financial Times Financial Book of the Year, 2010
“My advice is: Read it. While his book is not exactly beach reading, Posner is a fine writer with a real talent for making complex economic and financial matters clear to the average reader. If you’re a little vague on exactly what a credit-default swap is or why deflation can be a bigger problem than inflation, [this book] is just the ticket… Altogether, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy is the best thing I’ve read on the origins and development of the ‘Great Recession.’”—John Steele Gordon, National Review
