Paul Starr - Böcker

The sociologist Daniel Bell was an uncommonly acute observer of the structural forces transforming the United States and other advanced societies in the twentieth century. The titles of Bell’s major books—The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)—became hotly debated frameworks for understanding the era when they were published. In Defining the Age, Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer bring together a group of distinguished contributors to consider how well Bell’s ideas captured their historical moment and continue to provide profound insights into today’s world. Wide-ranging essays demonstrate how Bell’s writing has informed thinking about subjects such as the history of socialism, the roots of the radical right, the emerging postindustrial society, and the role of the university. The book also examines Bell’s intellectual trajectory and distinctive political stance. Calling himself “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture,” he resisted being pigeon-holed, especially as a neoconservative.Defining the Age features essays from historians Jenny Andersson, David A. Bell, Michael Kazin, and Margaret O’Mara; sociologist Steven Brint; media scholar Fred Turner; and political theorists Jan-Werner Müller and Stefan Eich. While differing in their judgments, they agree on one premise: Bell’s ideas deserve the kind of nuanced and serious attention that they finally receive in this book.

The sociologist Daniel Bell was an uncommonly acute observer of the structural forces transforming the United States and other advanced societies in the twentieth century. The titles of Bell’s major books—The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)—became hotly debated frameworks for understanding the era when they were published. In Defining the Age, Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer bring together a group of distinguished contributors to consider how well Bell’s ideas captured their historical moment and continue to provide profound insights into today’s world. Wide-ranging essays demonstrate how Bell’s writing has informed thinking about subjects such as the history of socialism, the roots of the radical right, the emerging postindustrial society, and the role of the university. The book also examines Bell’s intellectual trajectory and distinctive political stance. Calling himself “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture,” he resisted being pigeon-holed, especially as a neoconservative.Defining the Age features essays from historians Jenny Andersson, David A. Bell, Michael Kazin, and Margaret O’Mara; sociologist Steven Brint; media scholar Fred Turner; and political theorists Jan-Werner Müller and Stefan Eich. While differing in their judgments, they agree on one premise: Bell’s ideas deserve the kind of nuanced and serious attention that they finally receive in this book.

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama—and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction. The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. The nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining. Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.

America's leading role in today's information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world's dominant economy and most powerful state. But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither a world power nor a primary centre of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications-in postal service and newspaper publishing, then in development of the telegraph and telephone networks, later in the whole repertoire of mass communications.In this wide-ranging social history of American media, from the first printing press to the early days of radio, Paul Starr shows that the creation of modern communications was as much the result of political choices as of technological invention. With his original historical analysis, Starr examines how the decisions that led to a state-run post office and private monopolies on the telegraph and telephone systems affected a developing society. He illuminates contemporary controversies over freedom of information by exploring such crucial formative issues as freedom of the press, intellectual property, privacy, public access to information, and the shaping of specific technologies and institutions. America's critical choices in these areas, Starr argues, affect the long-run path of development in a society and have had wide social, economic, and even military ramifications. The Creation of the Media not only tells the history of the media in a new way it puts America and its global influence into a new perspective.