The Unsustainable American State

Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-539213-5
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Format (B × H): 239 mm x 155 mm, Gewicht: 626 g

The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities.

Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jacobs, Lawrence

King, Desmond

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Staats- und Regierungsformen, Staatslehre
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Volkswirtschaftslehre Allgemein Geschichte der VWL
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitik
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Wirtschaftspolitik, politische Ökonomie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Acknowledgements

- List of Contributors

- Part 1. The Strains of Governance

- 1.: The Political Crisis of the American State: The Unsustainable State in a Time of Unraveling by Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King

- 2.: Is Inequality a Threat to Democracy? by John Ferejohn

- Part 2. From Nineteenth CenturyLegacies to Twentieth Century Orthodoxy

- 3.: The Resilient Power of the States Across the Long Nineteenth Century: An Inquiry into a Pattern of American Governance by Gary Gerstle

- 4.: The First New Federalism and the Development of the Modern American State: Patchwork, Reconstitution or Transition? by Kimberley S Johnson

- 5.: The Missing State in Postwar American Political Thought by Desmond King and Marc Stears

- Part 3. The Modern American State

- 6.: No Class War: Economic Inequality and the American Public by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs

- 7.: Economic Inequality and Political Representation by Larry Bartels

- 8.: Promoting Inequality: The Politics of Higher Education Policy in an Era of Conservative Governance by Suzanne Mettler

- 9.: Moving Feminist Activists Inside the American State: The Rise of a State Movement Intersection and its Effects on State Policy by Lee Ann Banaszak

- 10.: From Kanye West to Barack Obama: Black Youth, the State and Political Alienation by Cathy J. Cohen

- Part 4. The Inherited State Moving Forward

- 11.: American State Building: The Theoretical Challenge by Desmond King and Robert Lieberman.

- 12.: A Historian's Reflection on the Unsustainable American State by Liz Cohen

- 13.: Taking Stock by Stephen Skowronek

Über Autor(innen)

Lawrence Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He also is a professor in the University of Minnesota's Department of Political Science.

Desmond King is the Andrew Mellon Professor of American Government and Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy.