Thursday, July 08, 2004

On "More Equal Than Others"

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7700.html

More Equal Than Others:
America from Nixon to the New Century

Godfrey Hodgson

Cloth | 2004 | $29.95 / £19.95 | ISBN: 0-691-11788-8
384 pp. | 6 x 9

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Chapter 1 [HTML] or [PDF format]

During the past quarter century, free-market capitalism was recognized not merely as a successful system of wealth creation, but as the key determinant of the health of political and cultural democracy. Now, renowned British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson takes aim at this popular view in a book that promises to become one of the most important political histories of our time. More Equal Than Others looks back on twenty-five years of what Hodgson calls "the conservative ascendancy" in America, demonstrating how it has come to dominate American politics.

Hodgson disputes the notion that the rise of conservatism has spread affluence and equality to the American people. Quite the contrary, he writes, the most distinctive feature of American society in the closing years of the twentieth century was its great and growing inequality. He argues that the combination of conservative ideology and corporate power and dominance by mass media obsessed with lifestyle and celebrity have caused America to abandon much of what was best in its past. In fact, he writes, income and wealth inequality have become so extreme that America now resembles the class-stratified societies of early twentieth-century Europe.

More Equal Than Others addresses a broad range of issues, with chapters on politics, the new economy, immigration, technology, women, race, and foreign policy, among others. A fitting sequel to the author's critically acclaimed 1976 book America In Our Time, it is not only an outstanding synthesis of history, but a trenchant commentary on the state of the American Dream.

Godfrey Hodgson is an Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He is the author of six books, including The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Biography, America In Our Time (Knopf) and People's Century (Time Books).

Review:

"[A] wonderfully written, wide-ranging and profoundly depressing book. Hodgson's theme is that the US has changed for the worse in the past 25 years: inequality is supplanting equality, even equality of opportunity."--Kathleen Burk, Financial Times

Table of Contents:

Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction
Disappointment and Denial xvii
1 State of the Union 1
2 New Politics 29
3 New Technology 61
4 New Economics 87
5 New Immigrants 112
6 New Women 139
7 New South, Old Race 172
8 New Society 203
9 New World 249
10 New Century 288
Notes 305
Select Bibliography 349
Index 361