Introduction
1. Our focus in this book is on democracy inside states, not on prospects for transnational democracy. The latter may be desirable, but o achieve it would require not just new legal arrangements, nor respect for universal rights, but social foundations that do not currently exist. State capacities are challenged by global pressures today, but states are still important to democratic projects.
2. To follow Pierre Bourdieu, one might note that university professors, journalists, and some other professionals constitute a dominated fraction of this dominant class. They are privileged, have elite educations, and have capacities for voice and influence denied to most citizens. But they generally do not have either economic or political power. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
3. As the former Yugoslavia was breaking up, ethnic realignment was encouraged by asking, as a common saying had it, “Why should I be in a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?” So reports political scientist Ivan Krastev in Ezra Klein, “The Rest of the World Is Worried about America,” New York Times, July 1, 2021.
4. Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
5. Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021).
6. Amid political polarization, it is commonly remarked that facts do not change opinions. It would be more accurate to say that the ways facts are taken on board reflects unconscious efforts to maintain commitments to preexisting ways of thinking and feeling. In a famous study, the social psychologist Leon Festinger and colleagues examined how members of a cult whose leader predicted apocalypse responded when the disaster did not materialize. The short answer is that while some dropped out of the cult, most found ways to minimize the implications of the uncomfortable fact, to explain it as merely an error of calculation, and to sustain their commitments to both their belief system and their community. They acted to reduce “cognitive dissonance,” which is an emotional state as well as a problem of thinking. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (New York: Harper, 1956); see also David Heise, Expressive Order: Confirming Sentiments in Social Actions (New York: Springer 2007). One might begin along these lines to explain the willingness of many of Donald Trump’s followers to interpret his electoral defeat as theft. Obviously, encouragement from siloed media and conspiracy theorists helped. But we should apply the same sort of analysis to the dominant liberal elite that for years has had such difficulty even seeing the “fact” of the popular discontents that shaped support for Trump.
7. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).
8. For “possessive individualism” see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). For the “expressive” tradition see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Almost all the terms in debates about democracy are ambiguous and contested, but none more so than the words “liberal” and “liberalism.” These share an obvious reference to the idea of liberty, or freedom, but can emphasize (1) freedom of economic action from government restriction, (2) freedom of individuals to develop their own identities and pursue their own goals, (3) the institutional framework intended to guarantee freedom, especially by articulating rights, or (4) free formation of the voluntary associations of civil society. The first sense has been more prominent in Europe, and the second sense in North America, where it informed both the emphasis on religious freedom in the era of the country’s founding and the more recent proliferation of claims for recognition of different identities. The third sense is common in phrases such as “liberal democracy,” meaning that which is coupled with guarantees of civil rights. In this book, we include this third sense in our use of the term “republican,” both to reduce confusion with the first two senses of liberalism and to recognize the important republican tradition in political thought that was basic to the development of constitutional government. Republicanism also emphasizes associational life among citizens, though often either as inherited community or personal moral commitment to the whole. Liberalism in the fourth sense crucially contributed the emphasis on voluntary associations. In this, it was reinforced by Scottish moral philosophy, with its ideas of civil society, sympathy, and common sense. There are further complexities, such as whether groups have liberties (or rights) that do not reduce to the liberties of their individual members. For example, is freedom of religion entirely grasped by freedom of individual conscience, or is there an additional dimension of freedom for religions as socially organized or culturally integrated groups with authority structures other than individual conscience?
9. There is an analogy to the international project of human rights which flourished, especially since the 1970s, in place of projects of political transformation. See Sam Moyn, The Last Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). To really achieve the equal rights claimed by all domestic “identity” groups or the human rights promised by the proliferation of activism in the last fifty years would require large-scale political and economic change. But it is possible to separate the utopian and necessarily collective dimension of each from the less radical project of protecting the rights of individuals without transforming political or economic regimes.
10. It is a dirty and seldom recognized secret that the triumph of neoliberalism, financialization, and a new cluster of giant corporations brought not only the deindustrialization of the United States, Great Britain, and other Western countries, but also their decline in the face of a rising China.
11. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Food Supply and Distribution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
12. In both the Soviet Union and China, disastrous famines were evidence that, without democracy, communism failed to live up to its own ideals and to keep citizens alive. In the Soviet Holodomor—death by hunger—of 1932–1933 some six million people perished. Forced collectivization was a major factor but hunger was also deployed politically against peasants resisting change, especially in the Ukraine. A classic source on the long-denied famine is Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (London: Pimlico, 2000; orig. 1986). Bad agricultural policy, botched central planning, and politically driven willingness to accept deaths cost more than fifteen million lives in China’s Great Famine of 1959–1961; this was also denied. See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010).
13. See Jan Bremen, Kevan Harris, Ching Kwan Lee, and Marcel van der Linden, eds., The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
14. This decline in social associations is the central theme of Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster 2000). In Upswing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020, with Shaylyn Romney), he charts some reasons to hope for renewal.
15. The collapse of German democracy in the 1930s is hardly the only example. See the cases addressed by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Penguin, 2018) and Adam Przeworski, Crises of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
1. It should be clear that the institutions and constitutional arrangements required to realize this condition will be very different in different societies and eras, depending on the role of government, the sources of power, the types of parties and social movements, and a host of other factors. What the telos requires is constantly changing in history.
2. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942).
3. It is a remarkable fact that these links between social ranking and the level of voting do not hold universally. Mukulika Banerjee shows in Why India Votes? (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2017) how these relationships are reversed in that country so that, for instance, the poor and lower caste vote more than the rich and upper caste. Her research shows that rituals of the day of voting, when the multiple, severe hierarchies of the society seem to be at least temporarily set aside and the realm of the people seems on the same level as that of those in power, create a sense of the power of democracy and feed what is called here “enthusiasm” around an experience of forward movement. Whether an election-day “high” can survive the many daily experiences of spectacular elite power remains to be seen.
4. See Thomas Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2013), chaps. 8 and 9.
5. For discussion of the “skyboxification” of American leisure activities, see Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 163–203.
6. The reference here is to the (in)famous remark by Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election season to the effect that 47 percent of the population was drawing from, rather than contributing to, the wealth of the country and that the protagonists of a return to austere self-reliance start off in any election with a handicap.
7. Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017), 100.
8. See Alana Samuels, “The End of Welfare as We Know It,” Atlantic, April 1, 2016.
9. The quotation is from a personal conversation. Michael Warner makes similar comments in his lecture “Fake Publics,” a transcript of which is so far regrettably unpublished, though a precis of which can be found at https://
10. Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
11. I owe this latter point and much of the above discussion to Dan Carpenter.
12. Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Oxford: Routledge, 2007).
13. Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civic Sphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
14. Habermas, Inclusion of the Other (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
15. See Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From (New York: Nation Books, 2017), chap. 2.
16. Polakow-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From, chap. 3.
17. Polakow-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From, chap. 8. Fears of this kind also play a role in the United States, as discussed in later chapters of this book. Remember the slogan of white supremacists at the Charlottesville demonstration in 2017: “Jews will not replace us,” quoting Renaud Camus. The deranged man behind the 2019 El Paso mass shooting produced a manifesto expressing the same sentiments, as described in John Eligon, “The El Paso Screed, and the Racist Doctrine Behind It,” New York Times, August 7, 2019.
18. The outlook is described by W. E. B. Du Bois in his description of the perspective of American white men: “They are filled with Good Will for all men, provided these men are in their places,” and they “aim to treat others as they want to be treated themselves, so far as this is consistent with their necessarily exclusive position” (quoted by Robert Gooding-Williams in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Winter 2019), 28. Of course, these assumptions of precedence can motivate very different actions, all the way from a simple feeling of “we come first” to fascist-style white supremacy militias. They all have to be opposed, but with very different methods.
19. For a fuller discussion of the scapegoat mechanism, see the work of René Girard, particularly Le bouc èmissaire (1984), translated as The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
20. See Williams, White Working Class.
21. See J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016).
22. See Johannes Hillje, “Return to the Politically Abandoned: Conversations in Right-Wing Populist Strongholds in Germany and France,” report, Das Progressive Zentrum, 2018, https://
23. “As an open advocate of “illiberal democracy”—his country is the first and only EU member state to be considered just “partly free” by the think tank Freedom House—Orbán has never tried to sugarcoat his autocratic aims, and has justified them by invoking national sovereignty and national security.” Yasmeen Serhan, “The EU Watches as Hungary Kills Democracy,” Atlantic, April 2, 2020.
24. “Populist” rule in East European societies has to be understood in light of the special conditions attending their transition from communism and their fraught relations with the longer-established democracies of Western Europe. See the interesting discussion in Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy (London: Allen Lane, 2019), especially chap. 1.
25. See the interesting description of the outlook in the early 1930s in the West in Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liverwright, 2013).
26. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
27. Pierre Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie: La politique à l’âge de la défiance (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
28. For further detail on this, see the interesting discussion in Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018).
1. To be sure, a few of the world’s democracies are still officially kingdoms; this is one of the ways democracy can be incomplete. But these are constitutional monarchies—which means, in effect, monarchy tempered by republicanism. The will of the monarch is limited by rules and by provision for others to exercise power. The government exists for the public good not simply the benefit of its monarch. Neither it nor the country can be owned like private property. Public good was rendered as “commonwealth” in seventeenth-century England. The word lives on, almost unnoticed, in the official names of several American states and a few countries such as Australia and the Bahamas. Finally, several countries are formally named “Democratic Republic” to signify the importance of both sets of ideas, although, ironically, many of these, like the People’s Democratic Republic of (North) Korea, display little republican freedom, rule of law, or democratic voice.
2. The US Pledge of Allegiance is a very distinctively American articulation of ideals and commitments. It was not formally adopted by government until the Second World War and the phrase “under God” was only inserted during the anti-communist movement of the early 1950s. But its roots lie in seeking national unity after the Civil War. It was formulated by Francis Bellamy, an activist and entrepreneur trying to sell magazine subscriptions on the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the New World. A Baptist minister, Christian socialist, and racist opponent of immigration, Bellamy incorporates into one person many of the contradictions of American patriotism and pursuit of progress. See Richard J. Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the US Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
3. See Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (New York: Harper, 2020).
4. The Roman historian Sallust was widely read and wrote of the transition to empire: “Riches became the epidemic passion; and where honours, imperial sway, and power, followed in their train, virtue lost her influence, poverty was deemed the meanest disgrace, and innocence was thought to be no better than a mark for malignity of heart. In this manner riches engendered luxury, avarice, and pride; and by those vices the Roman youth were enslaved. Rapacity and profusion went on increasing; regardless of their own property, and eager to seize that of their neighbours, all rushed forward without shame or remorse, confounding every thing sacred and profane, and scorning the restraint of moderation and justice” (Arthur Murphy, ed., The Works of Sallust [New York: J. Carpenter, 1807], 17).
5. John Adams’s wrote A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787) in response to French criticism that Americans too slavishly followed the English idea of a mixed constitution full of checks and balances.
6. The phrase Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was articulated by Robespierre in a speech of 1790, spread widely on posters and was painted on walls. Fraternité is the hardest idea to translate. “Solidarity” is a less sexist alternative to the word “fraternity.” But it does not fully incorporate all important lineages of fraternité. Brotherhood invokes not just family relations but also Christianity and the traditions and institutions of artisans. See William H. Sewell, Jr. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Though connotations have shifted, the idea of fraternity was long a basic political theme in America. See Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
7. This was true throughout early modernity and such experience of distinctive social conditions and ways of life is enduringly significant. Thinking about freedom, like thinking about much else, was changed by the rise of industry, cities, large-scale markets, and national integration. Among other distinctions of the preindustrial United States from Europe was the greater distance between farms and between towns—which favored a strong ethos of self-reliance.
8. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Philip Pettit, Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
9. Ideas of negative versus positive liberty are long standing. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Alan Ryan, ed., The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109:2 (1999), 287–337.
10. Charles Taylor has discussed of horizons of evaluation and qualitative discussions among goods in many works, including Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). See also Michiel Meijer, Charles Taylor’s Doctrine of Strong Evaluation (Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).
11. Orlando Patterson has argued that the ancient birth of the very idea of freedom was linked to the unfreedom of slavery; see Freedom, Vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). He links slavery to the dehumanizing condition Franz Fanon calls “social death;” see Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
12. As many commentators have observed, the Declaration complains that the King of England is reducing Americans nearly to the status of slaves without considering the justice of slavery as practiced in America. The authors, including Thomas Jefferson, seem to have had a remarkable capacity for blocking this issue out of their thought. See Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Simply extending the right to vote to a majority of its citizens took the United States over 130 years. In France, universal male suffrage was declared in 1792, but swiftly abandoned; French women didn’t gain the vote until the last days of World War II. Delays were similarly long in other “democracies.” Sanford Lakoff sees the progressive overcoming of such limits as basic to democracy; see Sanford Lakoff, Democracy: History, Theory, Practice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).
13. Carol Anderson, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). These issues have not gone away. Fear of Blacks is a major factor in both opposition to gun control and severe, often fatal, policing of Blacks with guns.
14. I here borrow the phrase Hannah Arendt famously used to describe the condition of stateless people such as refugees fleeing the Holocaust. See The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1951). Like refugees, slaves were without political community.
15. Judgment in the US Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sanford, March 6, 1857, Case Files 1792–1995, Record Group 267, Records of the Supreme Court of the United States, National Archives, Washington, DC. The transcript of the majority decision read out by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney can be viewed at https://
16. In 2019, the New York Times initiated fierce debate with the publication of a set of essays and literary works intended to put slavery and racism at the center of American self-understanding. The device was to memorialize the 1619 arrival of a slave ship and the sale of these transported Africans to American colonists. This, the authors suggested, constituted the start of the country as much or more than many familiar dates and events, including the Declaration of Independence. “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written,” the introductory essay by Nikole Hannah Jones asserts; “Black Americans have fought to make them true.” Nikole Hannah Jones, “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One,” New York Times, August 14, 2019. The binary rhetoric of true and false is misleading, and the account contained overstatements that helped fan controversy even among otherwise sympathetic historians. But the new national original story did call attention to a basic structuring contradiction in American history and pursuit of democracy.
17. Preston Brooks battered Sumner with a heavy cane, stopping only when the cane snapped. This cemented a Northern image of Southern brutality but was widely celebrated in the South as a justified defense of honor. Efforts to remove Brooks from Congress failed and indeed he was reelected. Two Southern towns renamed themselves in his honor. See Williamjames Hull Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). See also Harlan Joel Gradin, “Losing Control: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Breakdown of Antebellum Political Culture,” PhD Diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1991, especially for its thoughtful account of the degeneration and divergence of American political cultures.
18. I do not mean that there were no laws or policies from which Blacks and others benefited or none that tried to reduce discrimination. The New Deal was in many ways a boon to Black Americans even though it incorporated deep inequality. Rather, I mean that, in that more than seventy-five-year gap, there was no legislation at the federal level specifically empowering Blacks as democratic citizens.
19. To be precise, Lincoln never used the word “democracy” in the speech. He described the United States as a country conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality, said that it should have a “new birth of freedom,” and declared that government of, by, and for the people would not perish. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992) sees the address as giving equality new emphasis; James T. Kloppenberg, in Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 14, sees solidarity and unity as the core message, additional to earlier articulations of equality.
20. After Lincoln was assassinated, Senator Charles Sumner gave a eulogy, aptly linking Lincoln’s speech to the Declaration of Independence. In it, he also rightly recognized how words as well as deeds matter in history. Lincoln’s address spoke of the heroism of those who fought at Gettysburg, and included this prediction: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” But, of course, as Sumner indicated, Lincoln was wrong about this. The speech itself was “a monumental act,” he asserted: “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.” Charles Sumner, Promises of the Declaration of Independence: Eulogy on Abraham Lincoln, June 1, 1865 (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1865).
21. Similar contradictions beset other “advanced” democracies. In Germany, a conspiracy of silence accompanied the maintenance of ex-Nazis in positions of power. In many European countries, contradictions were inherited from the simultaneous formation of nation-states at home and colonies abroad. France, for example, fought Algerian independence from 1954 to 1962, and had fought for nearly a decade before that to maintain its hold on Vietnam.
22. Republican thought emphasized the virtues of politics, seeking resolution to problems in debate and agreement with fellow citizens. Arguably, rights thinking encouraged too much reliance on the judiciary rather than pursuit of political solutions. One of the problems for the civil rights movement was the extent to which its victories depended on courts and were resisted in legislatures—and in communities, voluntary associations, and businesses.
23. Business corporations and governments both built bureaucracies to address the issue of coordinating action at large scale; see Max Weber, Economy and Society [1922], ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), chap. 11. It is instructive to note the close links to transportation and communications infrastructure in, for example, the development of continental railroads shaped the rise of the modern corporation in the United States; see Alfred Chandler: The Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also Craig Calhoun, “The Infrastructure of Modernity: Indirect Relationships, Information Technology, and Social Integration,” in H. Haferkamp and N. J. Smelser, eds., Social Change and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 205–236.
24. With original legislation passed in 1944, this combined earlier New Deal agendas with an effort to create opportunities for returning World War II veterans. See Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, The GI Bill: The New Deal for Veterans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
25. See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Sarah Turner and John Bound, “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the G. I. Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans,” NBER Working Paper No. 9044, July 2002; Erin Blakemore, “How the GI Bill’s Promise Was Denied to a Million Black WWII Veterans,” History Today, September 30, 2019.
26. In 1940, 5.5 percent of men and 3.8 percent of women had completed four years of college. By 1964, the gap was 11.7 percent to 6.8 percent—and it kept growing until the 1980s, when it began to narrow again. In 2014, the number of women passed the number of men. A chart of data collected by the US Census Bureau can be viewed at Statista, “Percentage of the US Population Who Have Completed Four Years of College or More from 1940 to 2020, by Gender,” published by Erin Duffin, June 11, 2021, https://
27. Nancy Felice Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
28. Leah Platt Boustan and William J. Collins, “The Origins and Persistence of Black–White Differences in Women’s Labor Force Participation,” NBER Working Paper No. 19040, May 2013; see also Claudia Goldin, “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 and 1880,” Journal of Economic History 37:1 (March 1977), 87–108.
29. This is partly due to lower pay rates but also to differences in rates of employment, which in turn reflect a variety of factors, from education, to the kinds and locations of jobs on offer, to direct discrimination, and to indirect discrimination such as bias against the formerly imprisoned (and bias in who gets imprisoned). See summary and references in Olibenga Ajilore, “On the Persistence of the Black–White Unemployment Gap,” Center for American Progress, February 24, 2020, https://
30. Indeed, the Declaration says that this people in North America is separating from another people—by implication the English or perhaps British people (not just the British Empire, a political structure, not a people). England was an old kingdom and old identity, with a long-evoked but not unproblematic sense of common “peoplehood.” The recurrently contested notion of a British people, inclusive of English, Scots, and Welsh, was new to this era. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1832 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
31. A large literature opposes “ethnic” to “civic” nationalism, but misleadingly implies a sharp contrast of types and maps them onto other contrasts such as traditional and modern and simply bad and good. It is more helpful to see a variety of ways to forge “peoplehood,” overlapping in different combinations in different settings. Some of the relevant literature is addressed in Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London: Routledge, 2007).
32. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) traces republicanism from Florence through seventeenth-century England to America. For a philosophical account of the relationship of republicanism to democracy, see Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
33. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1963). See also Calhoun, “The Democratic Integration of Europe: Interests, Identity, and the Public Sphere,” in Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain, eds., Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 243–274.
34. Arendt was almost hostile to the other social dimensions of cohesion, deeming them at best lesser forms of integration, intrusions of necessity and interest where the emphasis should be on choice and the public good. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
35. This is discussed in Federalist 10 (in C. Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers [New York: New American Library, 1961], 77–84), where Madison moves away from thinking of parties as factions—a term of abuse among republicans because they split the polity for personal advantage. There is always risk that partisanship will move in that direction, if parties or partisans lose willingness or capacity to negotiate and instead seek simply to win at all costs.
36. Craig Calhoun, “Plurality, Promises, and Public Spaces,” in Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 232–259.
37. Madison quoted in James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 178.
38. Rousseau grappled with related questions when he distinguished a majority from unanimity or the will of all individuals, and both from the general will as the expression of what people shared as members of a community. This is close to the idea of public good, though not quite the same. Speaking of “will” rather than “interests” emphasizes commitment and choice, whereas the term “interests” suggests potential benefits which citizens may recognize, or not, and may act to secure, or not.
39. Recently, some members of the Republican Party have taken to asserting that the US Constitution establishes a republic, not a democracy—rather than government combining the two. This is both mistaken and pernicious. See the discussion in George Thomas, “ ‘America Is a Republic Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—and Wrong—Argument,” Atlantic, November 2, 2020.
40. Dennis C. Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), may overstate its case but is salutary.
41. For eloquent writing on the centrality of equality, see Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
42. For economists (following Paul Samuelson), goods are naturally public (a) if they cannot be consumed by any without making them available to many more, though not necessarily all (say, clean air); and / or (b) if consumption by one does not diminish availability to all (they are “non-rivalrous”). Paul A. Samuelson, “The Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics 36 (1954), 386–389. What I have called “interdependent” goods are similar, but there are distinctions, too. Clean air is good whether others participate or not; it is public only in the sense that restricting who gets it is hard (though not entirely impossible, as different prices for houses built just by the freeway or the polluting factory suggest). But with equality and solidarity, the issue is not just how they are distributed or consumed. Interdependence is built into what they are.
43. Quoted in Ricks, First Principles, 287–288.
44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835–1840], in Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, ed. Isaac Kramnick, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).
45. Madison’s main concern is to show that direct democracy cannot work at such scale and that representative democracy is necessary. In addition to Federalist 10, see Federalist 14 (in C. Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers [New York: New American Library, 1961]): “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” But the key distinction here is direct exercise of government versus mediation or management through representatives. Being able to work at larger scale was one advantage to republican political structures; other mechanisms were also important for keeping the focus on longer-term public good. But this was not a simple opposition of democracy to republicanism. It was an effort to combine them.
46. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, includes an entire section on “How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Principle of Interest Rightly Understood.” Volume 2 returns to the theme with more fine-grained social and cultural analysis.
47. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
48. Tocqueville saw equality as the defining feature of democracy—and yet he mostly ignored slavery. His English contemporary Harriet Martineau was clearer about the contradiction and its implications for the future of the United States (not surprisingly, she also saw gender issues more clearly). See her Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1937).
49. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
50. John Dewey, Democracy and Education [1919] (New York: Free Press, 1997); John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems [1927] (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1994).
51. This is a significant backdrop to Dewey’s famous debate with Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was not only more politically conservative and less optimistic; he was a journalist more attentive to the transformations that scale was bringing. He wrote of a “phantom public” in which most people engaged with public affairs very little unless mobilized by leaders, who often produced public opinion by manipulation rather than debate. See Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public [1925] (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2006). Confronted with fascism and disillusioned with democracy, Lippman called for a focus on simply making government efficient and relying on elite definitions of the public good. Dewey argued that democratic publics were merely in eclipse and could be renewed. The authors of this book share that hope, however chastened by yet another round of the kind of mediated manipulation of publics that disillusioned Lippmann.
52. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, chap. 6.
53. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, chap. 6.
54. There are numerous studies of this history. For the United States, see Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2005). In this, as in so much else, the 1970s marked a turning point. US newspaper circulation peaked in 1973 and has since fallen by nearly two-thirds. Pew Research Center, “Newspapers Fact Sheet,” June 29, 2021, https://
55. Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold (London: Atlantic Books, 2017).
56. Current systems correctly identify the gender of white men nearly 100 percent of the time—but get that of Black women wrong more than 30 percent of the time. Controversially, Google has forced out women who point to the problem. Cade Metz, “Who Is Making Sure the AI Machines Aren’t Racist?” New York Times, March 15, 2021.
57. See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
58. Nicole Cobie, “The Complicated Truth about China’s Social Credit System,” Wired, June 7, 2019.
59. There is great contestation over names today. In this book we refer to those who inhabited the United States before colonization and remain important members of the country as “American Indians.” The name obviously reflects a historical error—yet it has also become part of historical reality. Our decision to use this rather than “Native American” or other locutions is based mainly on what seem to be the primary choices of the people concerned (when they are referring to a wider category and not their distinct peoples). In Canada the term is First Nations. We use “indigenous” when we refer to the more global range of peoples who have confronted settlement, imperialism, and national expansion as encroachments on their territories and ways of life. There are obvious wrongs in abuse and expropriation. There is no simple right answer in nomenclature.
60. Tensions between imperialism and democracy appear not only in dominated territories. Europe’s first colonial powers, Spain and Portugal, were among its last democracies.
61. Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
62. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today [1873] (London: Penguin, 2001).
63. See Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
64. The sentiment helped to drive Brexit, the move to end British membership of the European Union. See Craig Calhoun, “Populism, Nationalism, and Brexit,” in William Outhwaite, ed., Brexit: Sociological Responses (London: Anthem Press, 1976), 57–76. It continues to shape renewed English nationalism. See Alisa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones, Englishness: The Political Force Transforming Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
65. See Michael McQuarrie, “The Revolt of the Rust Belt: Place and Politics in the Age of Anger,” British Journal of Sociology, 68 (2017), S120–S152, and his still unpublished comparative research on England and the United States.
66. Tracing the decline of employment in automotive manufacturing is complicated. Do you count just car making, or also the manufacturing of tires, glass, and paint? But the trend is clear and part of a sharp overall decline. US manufacturing jobs peaked at about 20 million in 1979, fell to less than 17 million by 1982, and, after recovering slightly, fell to 11 million between 1999 and 2011. For a chart of US Bureau of Labor Statistics created by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), see https://
67. See the moving reportage in George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2014) and the analysis in Michael McQuarrie, “The Revolt of the Rust Belt: Place and Politics in the Age of Anger,” British Journal of Sociology 68 (2017), S120–S152.
68. The experience noted here is a theme of Georg Simmel’s classic “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), chap. 20.
69. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944). See the helpful discussion in Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Kurtuluş Gemici, “Karl Polanyi and the Antinomies of Embeddedness,” Socio-Economic Review 6:1 (2008), 5–33.
70. See Craig Calhoun, “Indirect Relationships and Imagined Communities: Large-Scale Social Integration and the Transformation of Everyday Life,” in Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman, eds., Social Theory for a Changing Society (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,1991); Craig Calhoun, “The Infrastructure of Modernity: Indirect Relationships, Information Technology, and Social Integration,” in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds., Social Change and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 205–236.
71. Anselm Strauss, Images of the American City (New York: Free Press, 1961); Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Harvey Molotch, William Freudenburg, and Krista E. Paulsen, “History Repeats Itself, But How?: City Character, Urban Tradition, and the Accomplishment of Place,” American Sociological Review 65:6 (2000), 791–823; Gary Fine, “The Sociology of the Local,” Sociological Theory, 28:4 (2010), 355–376.
72. Corporate actors are characterized by more than just hierarchy or even scale. They are empowered by laws that recognize them as wielding concerted agency, with a separation between the will and legal responsibility of the corporation as such and either its owners or employees. Corporations can own property, enter into contracts, or litigate in the courts even though they are not persons in an ordinary sense. A disturbing 2010 US Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission even declared that corporations are protected by the Bill of Rights in the same way as other “citizens”—at least insofar as their free speech cannot be infringed by limits on their political campaign contributions. This asymmetry is surprisingly little considered in political theory. For a sociological perspective, see James S. Coleman, The Asymmetric Society (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982).
73. For one summary among many, see Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).
74. Venkatesh Rao suggests that an increasingly critical class distinction is whether or not you work “above the API”—that is, above the “application programming interface” that allows two software systems to talk to one another. (He attributes the coinage of the phrase “below the API” in this sense to technology sector executive Peter Reinhardt.) In other words: Do you issue commands to the digital networks that shape our lives, or do they issue commands to you? See Venkatesh Rao, “The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial,” blog post, August 17, 2017, https://
75. Cited in Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 633.
76. Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4 (2002), 869–897.
77. Trying to mitigate this concern, Appiah has argued for a more “rooted” cosmopolitanism. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W Norton, 2007).
78. For one of the first and best reports on the local lives that cosmopolitan elites so often fail to notice, see Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
79. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848], ed. Jeffrey C. Isaac (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 77.
80. The phrase is famously associated with Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. See Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things (Boston: Little Brown, 2017). For the encouraging hope that business is turning away from this ideology, see Hemant Taneja, “The Era of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Is Over,” Harvard Business Review, January 22, 2019.
81. The term “disruptive technologies” was popularized by innovation theorist Clayton Christensen. See, for example, Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen, “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” Harvard Business Review, 73 (January–February 1995), 43–53.
82. In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009), Friedrich Engels reports: “I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-peoples quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here, good morning, sir’ ” (276).
83. They are called “Luddites” because many proclaimed themselves followers of a (probably mythical) leader named Ned Ludd. Two classic accounts are Eric J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” Past and Present 1 (February 1952), 57–70; and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965). See also Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
84. The full passage: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again” (John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform [London: Macmillan, 1923], 80). This foreshadowed the emphasis on countercyclical government investment in Keynes’s later work.
85. This strange misreading—perhaps sometimes a willful distortion—is often repeated, including infamously by Niall Ferguson; see Simon Taylor, “The True Meaning of ‘In the Long Run We Are All Dead,’ ” blog post, May 5, 2013, https://
86. Robert C. Allen, “Engels’ Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British Industrial Revolution,” Explorations in Economic History, 46:4 (2009), 418–435.
87. In The Question of Class Struggle and Roots of Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), I argue that facing this kind of obliteration of communities as well as livelihoods produces greater radicalism than being part of a growing working class able to strike compromises with capitalism.
88. The pioneering supermarket chain A&P was founded in direct response to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, initially specializing in prepackaged tea and going on to scale up its logistics to offer lower prices. It was thus disruptive to small groceries. See Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism [1952] (London: Penguin, 1963), makes A&P a prime example in presenting the large firm as an alternative to both government price controls and the ideology of perfect competition. By 2010, A&P itself was bankrupt, a victim of further disruptive change.
89. W. Fred Cottrell, “Death by Dieselization: A Case Study in the Reaction to Technological Change,” American Sociological Review 16:3 (1951), 358–365.
90. See Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
91. See Block and Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism, chap. 5, on the “old poor law” associated with Speenhamland and social policy.
92. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845], trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (New York: John W. Lovell, 1887).
93. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
94. Our discussion is about domestic politics, but democracy is also affected by international upheavals, including shifting global hegemony, as in the Thirty Years War, when the Dutch and then the British consolidated hegemony in struggles with the Hapsburg Empires. During the conflicts from 1918 to 1945, which included struggles with new imperial powers, Britain passed hegemony to the United States. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974–2011); Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
1. This changed in the 1970s with the rise of “Eurocommunism” and the commitment of communist parties in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere to electoral democracy. See Santiago Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977); Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism (London: New Left Books, 1979).
2. See Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On how democratic transitions often leave elites in power, see Michael Albertys and Victor Menaldo, Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On the possible end of elite support for democracy, see Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020).
3. Membership organizations could be integral to local community; where it eroded they could not quite replace it. They declined precipitously in the new neoliberal era. This is the central theme of Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). In a later book, Putnam charts some reasons to hope for renewal: Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020).
4. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944) is a particularly informative account.
5. Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 [1975] (Paris: Hachette, 2004).
6. Public health had improved through the twentieth century in most developed countries. Trends commonly accelerated during les trente glorieuses; that for maternal mortality is especially focused in this period. For the British example, see Geoffrey Chamberlain, “British Maternal Mortality in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99:11 (2006), 559–563.
7. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society [1958] (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1984).
8. Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Educational Statistics (Washington, DC: Center for Educational Statistics, 1993). As the previous chapter stressed, rates of overall improvement masked racial disparities.
9. Louis Menand’s exciting general account appeared just as this book was going to press: The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021).
10. See Menand, The Free World.
11. “Modernization theory” produced an enormous literature, and its critical evaluation is nearly as voluminous. At the center of debates are how much it exercised Western power in proportion to benevolence, even after the end of formal colonial rule, and whether commitment to capitalism blocked the smooth growth it envisaged. On the political and social theory, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Early and influential economic critiques include Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa [1972] (London: Verso, 2018); Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ernesto Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). On continuing economic limits imposed not just by capitalism but by the self-interested approach the Western capitalist powers exercised individually and through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, see Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem Press, 2002).
12. On the utopian dimensions of the postwar and Cold War–era in the United States, see Menand, The Free World.
13. Sadly, from about the same time that the EU reached its peak enlargement, it began to lose its ability to look forward in solidarity. Enlargement itself exacerbated other sources of inequality and tensions over the financial contributions and benefits of member states. In 2005, elites sought backing for tighter integration and suffered defeats in ill-considered referenda. The financial crisis of 2008–2009 hit Europe especially hard and was made worse by policy responses that favored financial institutions and investors while imposing austerity on citizens. Tensions over Islam and immigration festered until they shaped the catastrophic failures of 2015. Financial and migration policies brought clashes within countries as much as among them. Indeed, domestic discontents and polarized politics drove Brexit—both the 2016 referendum and the years of largely bungled implementation that followed—and continue to drive upheavals and threats to leave the EU in different countries.
14. The Philippines had actually declared independence from Spain in 1898, seeking to establish a constitutional democratic republic, only to find Spanish rule replaced by American. On the United States’ never quite explicit empire, see Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) and Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
15. To be sure, democracy has had an uneven history in Ghana and Africa more generally. Among many, see Nic Cheeseman, Democracy in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Claude Ake, Democracy and Development in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996).
16. Martin Luther King Jr., Foreword, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1967).
17. Alan Brinkley, “Great Society,” in Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, eds., The Reader’s Companion to American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 42; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995); Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
18. This was a core theme for Jane Jacobs’s popular and influential Life and Death of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), though she focused on urban neighborhoods rather than suburbs (which she tended to consider lost causes).
19. On the nature of such transformations in the modern world system, see Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian, eds., Aftermath: A New Global Economic Order?, vol. 3 of Possible Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
20. The term has a history going back to Rudolf Hilferding who in the early twentieth century drew a contrast to extreme, nineteenth-century economic liberalism. It became prominent as organization was unravelling and neoliberalism being asserted. See Claus Offe: Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1985); Scott Lash and John Urry: The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1987); Martin Höpner, “Coordination and Organization: The Two Dimensions of Nonliberal Capitalism,” MPIfG Discussion Paper, No. 07 / 12 (Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, 2007); Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura, eds.: The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
21. The term “Fordist” comes from Antonio Gramsci. It clarifies that asymmetrical power shaped the bargains that produced organized capitalism. See Michel Aglietta, Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: Verso, 1976); Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, Beyond the Regulation Approach (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2006).
22. As Danielle Allen has argued, what democracy demands may be less actual equality than a sense of justice—which is achieved partly by continuous movement in the direction of justice. Danielle Allen, Education and Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
23. See data summarized in Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). See also David M. Kotz, Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
24. This had enduring consequences, as Roberto Frega emphasizes in “The Fourth Stage of Social Democracy,” Theory and Society 50:6 (2021), 489–513.
25. To be precise, these “groups” are categories of people who suffered inequality. Within the category identified by each label, experiences varied partly on the basis of webs of social relations. Active participation in churches and communities linked to certain historically Black colleges and universities partially counterbalanced the effects of belonging to the larger category subject to discrimination. See discussion in Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
26. For an insightful review of the political science literature, making the important point that we should be concerned not only with aggregate levels of trust, but also with how trustworthy the objects of trust are, see Margaret Levi and Laura Stoker, “Political Trust and Trustworthiness,” Annual Review of Political Science 3:1 (2000), 475–507. See also Lee Rainie and Andrew Perrin, “Key Findings about Americans’ Declining Trust in Government and Each Other,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2019, https://
27. Max Weber, Economy and Society [1922], ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). This passage comes in the context of (a) extensive discussion of the connection between bureaucracy and advancement of material infrastructure for connectivity and communication, and (b) development of Weber’s ideas about self-government not only in local communities but in “collegial” settings where relations among colleagues could replace or reduce top-down control.
28. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have persuasively argued that business became increasingly attractive in the late twentieth century precisely because it projected a “coolness,” dynamism, and expressive freedom absent from government bureaucracy. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999], trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2018).
29. David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
30. See Henry Giroux and David Purpel, eds., The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception or Discovery? (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1983); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
31. See Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). To say that discipline is a dimension of projects of behavior change (or social engineering) does not mean that they do not produce real benefits. It does mean that decisions—and behavioral compliance—are produced on bases other than informed choice, and as Foucault would suggest, that the human being, the person subjected to the discipline, is being remade in the process.
32. See David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019); and brief discussion in Chapter 2 of this book.
33. The phrase was printed on the punch cards used by computers that were growing increasingly prominent. It neatly aligned student protest against bureaucracy in the mass university—registration, for example—with criticism of disciplinary trends in the wider society. See Steven Lubar, “ ‘Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate’: A Cultural History of the Punch Card,” Journal of American Culture, 15:4 (Winter 1992), 43–55..
34. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (New York: Academic Press, 1979).
35. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972).
36. Among the many challenges for each category of subordinated or marginalized Americans have been identifying terms. There were not only insulting, pejorative terms. There were also paternalistic efforts to add dignity. There have been improvements proposed by intellectuals and activists. There is likely no perfection. We have settled on saying Black, American Indian, and Latino or Latina, which are perhaps the most common self-identifications.
37. There is by now a huge literature on neoliberalism. The term was coined in 1938 to describe arguments advanced especially by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2015], 38–52). It was then developed into ideology and communicated effectively and widely by Milton Friedman, among others. It was a network and social movement as much as a specific set of ideas. Hayek, Friedman, and colleagues created the Mont Pèlerin Society to support their new movement. For accounts of neoliberal economics and its political engagements, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion; Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Binyamin Applebaum, The Economists’ Hour (New York: Little Brown, 2019); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). For a critical examination informed by Marxism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For an intellectual history of neoliberalism’s relationship to globalism, see Quinn Slobodian, The Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
38. The argument that “neoliberalism is not a suitable analytical category because it changes or because it has multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings amounts to self-defeating denialism, expressing a desire for a neat and simple singular ideology with an ahistorical essence to replace the messy world of competing worldviews. Marxism, liberalism, and conservatism have experienced kaleidoscopic refraction, splintering, and recombination over the decades. We see no reason why neoliberalism would not exhibit the same diversity” (Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski, eds., Nine Lives of Neoliberalism [London: Verso, 2020], Kindle Edition, 3).
39. Paradoxically, economics became more pervasively influential at the same time that it became more abstractly mathematical. Perhaps understanding the formal models gave practitioners extra authority; certainly, there was a demand for experts to explain them.
40. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom [1944] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16. Hayek’s book is exactly contemporary to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), discussed in the previous chapter. Both fled Nazism to spend the war years in London, and the rise of fascism was influential on each of their great works, though they offered contrasting analyses. Hayek feared state domination and saw socialism as all too similar to Nazism (which had indeed called itself “national socialism”). Polanyi saw Nazism as a failed response to social disruption and social democracy as a better one.
41. Of course, there were economists deeply influenced by neoliberalism who advocated different policies, including more active government interventions. The founders of neoliberalism offered not only policy prescriptions but conceptual tools that could be used by other economists who reached different conclusions. And though it is hard to map, there is a difference between neoliberalism as a mode of economic analysis and as a more rigid ideology taken up in business policy debates.
42. Dean Baker, “This Is What Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace with Productivity,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 21, 2020, https://
43. Republicans have resisted raising the minimum wage for decades and continue to resist this as a component of stimulus packages—even for health workers in response to the current pandemic. The reasoning is partly that higher minimum wages would discourage creation of jobs, but mostly that, if higher wages are warranted, markets will bring them about.
44. Adam Smith was frequently claimed as an iconic forebear, but neoliberalism did not clearly reflect his views on markets in The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s emphasis on sympathy and virtues in Theory of Moral Sentiments was even more distant from neoliberalism.
45. See discussion in the previous chapter. James S. Coleman, The Asymmetric Society (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982), is one of the few works to address this asymmetry systematically. It is also interesting because it comes from a methodological individualist in many ways sympathetic to neoliberal economics, but serious in following Adam Smith’s lead on this dimension.
46. To be clear, the state is itself a kind of corporation, developed out of a venerable doctrine distinguishing individual human rulers from the office of kingship and, by extension, the organizational apparatus reporting to them. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). A similar line of reasoning distinguished the church and formal positions such as bishop and pope from those persons who might hold any such position. The distinction was poorly observed by corrupt kings and bishops, but played an important role in the development of the idea of sovereignty. This asserted not just autonomy from external interference, but also the right to determine internal arrangements and law. Republics likewise claimed sovereignty and were particularly concerned with protection against office-holders interested in personal gain rather than the public good.
47. Dartmouth v. Woodward 17 US (4 Wheat.), 518.
48. See Coleman, The Asymmetric Society; Meir Dan-Cohen, Rights, Persons, and Organizations: A Legal Theory for Bureaucratic Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Craig Calhoun, “The Infrastructure of Modernity,” in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds., Social Change and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 205–236.
49. The quotation is from a New York Times article in which Friedman popularized ideas from his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Milton Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times, September 13, 1970.
50. See discussion in Julio H. Cole, “Milton Friedman on Income Inequality,” Journal of Markets and Morality, 11:2 (2008), 239–253.
51. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 161–162.
52. See Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham, What Is Stakeholder Capitalism? The Davos Agenda 2021, https://
53. The term comes from John Ruskin, who noticed in nineteenth-century England that focus seemed to fall always on what was new and added, not on what was lost and damaged—or indeed made ugly. See John Ruskin, Unto These Last [1862] (London: Penguin, 1986).
54. For a summary of neoliberalism’s impact, see Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
55. The rise of finance was shaped not only economics but also by politics. See Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
56. On the way neoliberalism came to inform US Federal Reserve efforts to address inflation in the 1970s and pave the way for unregulated financialization, see Timo Walter and Leo Wansleben, “How Central Bankers Learned to Love Financialization: The Fed, the Bank, and the Enlisting of Unfettered Markets in the Conduct of Monetary Policy,” Socio-Economic Review, March 21, 2019.
57. The term comes from Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development [1910] (London: Taylor and Francis, 2011).
58. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987).
59. On how this informed the crisis of 2008–2009, see Craig Calhoun, “From the Current Crisis to Possible Futures,” in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian, eds., Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 9–42. There is, of course, an enormous literature on the crisis itself.
60. See Alfred Rappaport, Creating Shareholder Value: The New Standard for Business Performance (New York: Free Press, 1986). General Electric CEO Jack Welch was an influential emissary for the notion. For a more critical analysis, see Frank Dobbin and Dirk Zorn, “Corporate Malfeasance and the Myth of Shareholder Value,” Political Power and Social Theory 17 (2006), 179–198.
61. See Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
62. This number comes from “Riding the Storm: Market Turbulence Accelerates Diverging Fortunes,” a study released by Swiss bank UBS and accounting firm PwC on October 7, 2020; https://
63. Martin Neil Baily, William Bekker, and Sarah E. Holmes, “The Big Four Banks: The Evolution of the Financial Sector, Part I,” Brookings Institute report, May 2015, https://
64. These were major factors in the financial crisis. See Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Craig Calhoun, “From the Current Crisis to Possible Futures..
65. The seductive glamor is nicely evoked by Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism.
66. Stiglitz, Freefall.
67. China alone lifted some 500 million people out of poverty; see Branko Milanovich, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Neoliberalism facilitated transfer of economic leadership from the United States and the West to China and Asia and thus the decline of American hegemony. The onset of this decline encouraged Richard Nixon’s opening to China. See Orville Schell, “The Road to Beijing,” The Wire: China, July 11, 2021. But the extent of geopolitical churn still seemed new when it shaped Donald Trump’s appeal to “Make America Great Again.” When Ronald Reagan used a nearly identical phrase, in the context of a deindustrializing America, the international referent was still Cold War competition. When Trump appropriated it, after deindustrialization was nearly complete, the rise of China was the central international concern.
68. See Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015), on whether wise policy might enable renewed public investments and greater public returns on them.
69. There are exceptions such as doctors and lawyers. But it is worth noting that even their work has been subject to reorganization. A variety of less well-paid jobs have been created in a division of labor intended to reduce the costs of the most expensive professionals.
70. Years after many citizens’ lives were devastated by addiction, courts are recognizing the liability of once-respected corporations such as Johnson and Johnson. For a more detailed account of one particular firm and the Sackler family that ran and profited from it, see Patrick Radden Keefe, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” New Yorker, October 23, 2017. The Sacklers also offer an example of how the “recycling” of wealth through philanthropy in fact takes resources away from some communities—workers and the towns they lived in—and delivers it to others; in the Sackler case, the big recipients were Israel and museums in several major cities. See Anand Giridharadas, The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Vintage, 2018).
71. See Barry Meier, “A Nun, a Doctor, and a Lawyer—and Deep Regret over the Nation’s Handling of Opioids,” New York Times, August 18, 2019.
72. See Figure 3. See also Tommy Beer, “Top 1% of U.S. Households Hold 15 Times More Wealth than Bottom 50% Combined,” Forbes, October 8, 2020. Globally, about half of the world’s wealth is owned by the richest one percent. Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, 2018, https://
73. Kerry A. Dolan, Jennifer Wang, and Chase Peterson-Withorn, “Billionaires,” Forbes, March 5, 2019; Institute for Policy Studies, “Billionaire Bonanza 2017,” November 8, 2017, https://
74. Ben Steverman and Alexandre Tanzi, “The 50 Richest Americans Are Worth as Much as the Poorest 165 Million,” Bloomberg, October 8, 2020.
75. Information on the taxes paid—or avoided—by the very rich became available in 2021 when IRS records were leaked to the public interest journalism group ProPublica. See Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel, “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax,” ProPublica, June 8, 2021, https://
76. See Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Saez and Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice.
77. Carter Coudriet, “These Billionaires Want the Ultra-Wealthy to Pay More in Taxes,” Forbes, October 15, 2019.
78. R. Lachmann, First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (London: Verso, 2020).
79. Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, Danny Yagan, “Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility across Colleges in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 135 (2020), 1567–1633.
80. Rick Seltzer, “A Gulf in the Earnings Gap,” Inside Higher Ed, September 6, 2018..
81. Lisa J. Dettling, Joanne W. Hsu, Lindsay Jacobs, Kevin B. Moore, and Jeffrey P. Thompson, “Recent Trends in Wealth-Holding by Race and Ethnicity: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” FEDS Notes, September 27, 2017, https://
82. See data and analysis by the Inequality.org project of the Institute for Policy Studies, https://
83. For access to the report “OECD Regions at a Glance 2016,” see OECD, “Regional Inequalities Worsening in Many Countries,” press release, June 16, 2016, https://
84. Mary Harrington nicely discusses personal paths to lack of ownership and liquidity in “In Defence of the Woke Lefts,” UnHerd, May 13, 2021. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
85. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
86. Hastie’s words have been quoted widely, and as far back as news articles in the 1940s. I have not been able to find its original source.
1. Of course, there were precursors. The autocratic Otto von Bismarck introduced elements of a welfare state as early as the 1870s to secure support as he worked to unify Germany and make sure it stayed capitalist rather than socialist.
2. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
3. The phrase comes from a 1970 song by Janis Joplin (written in collaboration with Bob Neuwirth and Michael McClure). Prosperity theology has older roots, including in the teachings of Oral Roberts and other American Evangelists, but has been prominently promoted in the era of neoliberalism. It has also become global; see Simon Coleman, The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Simon Coleman, “The Prosperity Gospel: Debating Charisma, Controversy and Capitalism,” in S. Hunt, ed., The Brill Handbook of Contemporary Christianity: Movements, Institutions and Allegiance (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 276–296.
4. David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: Hurst, 2017).
5. Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere, 3–4.
6. Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere, 9.
7. Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere, 11.
8. Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (London: Penguin, 2019); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005).
9. Of course, giant corporations exert pervasive control over their employees and are driven by profit and the accumulation of capital. The same tech industry is also behind an unprecedented level of surveillance of what once was called private life. See David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, [1835–1840], in Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, ed. Isaac Kramnick, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003), vol. 2, chap. 13; Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 257.
11. Joe Biden, Tweet of November 28, 2020, https://
12. Charlene Pempe, “He’s Sending a Taste of Joy to Your Door,” Financial Times, May 13, 2021.
13. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
14. Paul Embery describes why many English workers are angry at Left and Right alike: “Both hitch their wagon to every minority crusade and then afford to it an undue level of prominence. Both are largely ignorant—and often contemptuous—of the lives and priorities of those in small-town Britain, of their communitarian impulse, traditional values, desire for belonging and sense of national pride” (“Labour Isn’t Working,” UnHerd, May 8, 2021).
15. A website under the banner of #SayTheirNames maintains a list of Black people who lost their lives to acts of racism and excessive force, https://
16. Jonathan Dunn, Sheldon Lyn, Nony Onyeador, and Ammanuel Zegeye, “Black Representation in Film and TV: The Challenges and Impact of Increasing Diversity” (New York: McKinsey and Co., March 11, 2021), https://
17. Richard Alba, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
18. This resulted in sociological differences over analyses of “class” and “stratification.” Class analysis emphasized breaks between classes and commonalities within each. Stratification analysis emphasizes potentially innumerable layers and individual mobility among them. Marxists sought to overturn the class system; non-Marxist socialists more often campaigned just to reduce the inequalities among classes. In the United States, explicit socialists were fewer, and “progressives” often sought not to reduce inequality but to increase opportunity and fairness. For one of the few studies of downward mobility, see Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence [1988] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
19. George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion [1912] (New York, Doubleday 2014), 29. The speech is preserved almost intact in George Cukor’s film adaptation, My Fair Lady (1964), though that film takes other liberties such as introducing Hollywood’s notion of a happy ending.
20. Michael Young coined the term in the satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy (London: Penguin, 1961).
21. See Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (London: Penguin 2019).
22. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture [1964] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
23. See his somewhat disgusted complaint in Michael Young, “Down with Meritocracy,” Guardian, June 28, 2001.
24. Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 14. This point also applies to nations. None is entirely self-made or self-sufficient. Yet some nationalists persist in thinking this way. The Republican former US Senator Rick Santorum combined insult and absurdity in a speech denigrating American Indians that, while extreme, reflected attitudes that have been widespread. “We birthed a nation from nothing—I mean, there was nothing here,” he said to an audience of right-wing Young Americans for Freedom. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture” (John L. Dorman, “CNN Drops Rick Santorum after Dismissive Comments about Native Americans,” New York Times, May 5, 2021).
25. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
26. Here it is important to remember growing capacities to alter human biology and development—starting with genetic engineering. In addition to all the social and ethical risks these pose, they challenge the notion that human beings are natural and that variations among them result from chance, evolution, or divine will. For the reflections of one leading scientist, see Jennifer Doudna, A Crack in Evolution: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 2017). And among the growing number of studies of related social issues, see John H. Evans, The Human Gene-Editing Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Michael J. Sandel, The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
27. By always emphasizing achievement rather than simply being, Byung-Chul Han suggests we have created a “burnout society.” Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
28. The question was posed by Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University, in a since-deleted tweet, April 3, 2021.
29. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
30. Our high-status publisher, Harvard University Press, uses a style guide that indicates its preference for “Latinx” over “Latina” and “Latino” which are both gendered and less friendly to trans people. We think Harvard is motivated by trying to do what is right and to reduce gender bias. We also think efforts to change habitual language can play a positive role in social change. But we note that correcting for one bias can introduce others. Inclusion in the elite community of those who know the new, right words is still the reproduction of an elite even if positive in other ways. And construction of new terms can also be in tension with using identity terms that people choose for themselves.
31. Conservatives have been quicker to challenge new jargon, partly because they are invested in old cultural categories and hierarchies. This makes it hard to distinguish the critique of tacit elitism from defense against more substantive challenge. See Nicholas Clairmont, “The Language of Privilege,” Tablet, September 28, 2020; David Brooks, “This Is How Wokeness Ends,” New York Times, May 13, 2021. Similar arguments are also made by self-styled progressives such as Todd Gitlin, who objects to the vocabulary as well as the substance of identity politics in The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Eleanor Robertson, “Intersectional-What? Feminism’s Problem with Jargon Is that Any Idiot Can Pick It Up and Have a Go,” Guardian, September 30, 2017; Ben Andrew, “The Language of the Left—And How It Alienates Progressives from Their Own Causes,” Liberal Democratic Voice, November 14, 2016.
32. Harry Brighouse, “On the Meaning of Merit,” keynote address, USC Rossier Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice Annual Conference, January 16, 2014. Brighouse’s slide deck can be viewed at https://
33. In the United States, more and more students attend schools with some manner of private selection system and usually private funding, whether these are simply private market ventures or linked to churches or organized as “charter” schools. By comparison, France retains a strong, centralized, and basically universalistic system of public education. It is highly selective internally, but it is the same system for almost all students. In England, private, fee-based, and selective schools have long histories. Comprehensive schools open to all potential students were set up after World War II and expanded under Labour in the 1960s. Since then, during the neoliberal era, private and selective schools have grown more prominent—and are widely seen as key factors perpetuating or even increasing inequality. See David Kynaston and Francis Green, Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), though note that England relies more on private schools than other parts of Britain.
34. We refer to credentialed, institutionally consecrated, and market-recognized higher education. As a remarkable history of autodidacts demonstrates, people can learn a lot without universities or colleges.
35. Paul Bolton, “Education: Historical Statistics,” House of Commons Library Standard Note SN / SG / 4252, updated November 27, 2012, https://
36. This argument was decisively answered by extensive empirical research associated with the Robbins Report of 1963: Higher Education: Report of the Committee appointed by the Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 1963). See also Nicholas Barr, ed., Shaping Higher Education: Fifty Years After Robbins (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2014).
37. It is worth noting that countries that have historically benefited from relatively egalitarian university systems, such as Canada and Germany, have recently been introducing more hierarchy, largely to try to move up in global rankings. This is not just a part of university strategy; countries also compete over rankings—say, as destinations for investment.
38. Zhao “Molly” Yusi, quoted in Laurie Chen, “Hard Work Got Me into Stanford University, Says Chinese Student in Viral Video after Parents Paid US$6.5 Million to Get Her Accepted,” South China Morning Post, May 3, 2019.
39. Sara Goldrick Rabb, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). This is also an enormous burden on families. See also Caitlin Zaloom, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
40. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: New Press, 2017).
41. Capital takes multiple forms, according to Bourdieu, and is convertible among them. Converting financial wealth into educational credentials or markers of cultural taste is, among other things, a way of legitimating inequality. But it is also possible to convert social connections and cultural standing into economic opportunities and resources. See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 243.
42. Jason DeParle, “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs,” New York Times, January 4, 2012.
43. Alexis de Tocqueville made a similar point in Democracy in America, where he noted that in a society that rejects inheritance and confidently proclaims itself open to social mobility, those who fail to advance are implicitly encouraged to blame themselves. Sennett and Cobb showed this indeed to be still the pattern in The Hidden Injuries of Class. Social mobility and its absence have many explanations, and individual talent and effort are only part of the mix. Possession of various kinds of capital typically matters more.
44. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, 17.
45. Bourdieu develops an analysis of symbolic violence as the exercise of power in how people are categorized in Outline of a Theory of Practice [1972] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and many subsequent works. See also Michael Burawoy, Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
46. Clinton supporters have suggested that her comment, made in the heat of an ugly campaign, was misinterpreted and intentionally distorted. See Domenico Montenaro, “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables,’ in Full Context of This Ugly Campaign,” National Public Radio, September 10, 2016.
1. Aside from numerous invaluable conversations with my coauthors, Craig Calhoun and Charles Taylor, I have profited from my discussions with Sally Ewing, Robert Hariman, Benjamin Lee, and Liam Mayes while writing this chapter. I am especially indebted to Liam Mayes for his assistance in editing the final draft and providing suggestions for many constructive revisions and refinements.
2. The oligarchic tendencies of democracy, presciently identified and analyzed by Robert Michaels in 1911, might require some updating, but that phenomenon itself is historically unmistakable and sociologically unavoidable. Robert Michaels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Free Press, 1962).
3. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
4. My point is that in the framework of democratic politics, class conflict, especially in modern highly stratified societies, has limited interpretive value. While one might be able to offer a rigorous Marxist or sociological analysis of class conflicts and either how they undermine the democratic project or how democracies contain and deflect them—class conflict itself tends to be removed from the vocabulary of practical democratic politics. Moreover, progressive candidates or movements are likely avoid invoking the idea of class conflict lest they be accused of fomenting class conflict by their opponents, a potent negative charge in bourgeois electoral democracies. Thus, to dwell on the social conflict unavoidable in any given society, one needs to recast it in the language of the elites and the nonelites. Although such a recasting might be analytically even more nebulous than a traditional class analysis, the opposition between elites and nonelites has far more resonance in the daily language of politics, especially democratic politics since time of the ancient Athenian democracy. See Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
5. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 15.
6. Larry Diamond, “Is the Third Wave Over?,” Journal of Democracy 7:3 (1996), 20–37; Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26:1 (2015), 141–155.
7. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Penguin, 2018), 3.
8. Larry Diamond, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (New York: Penguin, 2019); David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia-Europe-America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018); Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (New York: Henry Holt, 2019).
9. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
10. See Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
11. Michael Ignatieff, “Democracy against Democracy: The Electoral Crisis of Liberal Constitutionalism,” keynote address delivered at Popular Sovereignty, Majority Rule, and Electoral Politics, a conference hosted by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, Austria, May 30, 2019.
12. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 5.
13. The name of the principle derives from Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 novel Anna Karenina, which begins: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
14. See, for instance, what Larry Diamond calls “the autocrats’ twelve-step program,” in Ill Winds, 64–65.
15. Roger Cohen, “Steve Bannon Is a Fan of Italy’s Donald Trump,” New York Times, May 18, 2019.
16. For an excellent case study, See Prashant Jha, How BJP Wins: Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2017).
17. It was peaceful, but not exactly civil. The incumbent, John Adams, did not stay for the inauguration and, on the last day of his presidency, appointed a host of judges aligned with his Federalist Party. In retirement, however, Jefferson and Adams did reconcile. Today, their massive correspondence stands as a monument to the lost art of political friendship.
18. With a commanding parliamentary majority, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi persuaded President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to impose the “Emergency” (rule by decree), ostensibly to quell mounting incidents of “internal disturbances.” The emergency was in effect for a twenty-one-month period from June 25, 1975, to March 21, 1977, during which, among other things, civil liberties were curbed, the press was censored, and a large number of political opponents were imprisoned. On January 18, 1977, Indira Gandhi abruptly called for new parliamentary elections for March and released all political prisoners on the obvious assumption that she would be returned to power with an overwhelming majority and thus vindicate her decision to declare the “Emergency.” Instead, her Congress Party was decisively defeated, including Indira Gandhi’s losing her own seat in the Lok Sabha (lower house). In the Indian political imaginary, the election of 1977 has acquired a hallowed status of attesting to the wisdom of the Indian electorate, largely poor and illiterate.
19. Similarly, Erdogan’s party recently lost municipal elections in Istanbul, a stronghold of his party. Erdogan accepted the results. This does not mean Erdogan and his party will stop transgressing constitutional constraints and institutional guardrails. Rather, it suggests that the only way to push back against majoritarian democracy is to defeat it electorally.
20. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1947), 269, cited in Huntington, The Third Wave, 6.
21. Huntington, The Third Wave, 7.
22. Huntington, The Third Wave, 9–10.
23. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 3.
24. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 9.
25. It is ironic that the “election,” unlike the “lot,” was historically regarded as the preferred aristocratic mechanism within the republican tradition, both ancient and modern, that ensured rule by the elite rather than by the multitude. In our age of mass democracy, even though the elites (perhaps not the right kind of traditional elites) continue to rule, the election is viewed as a populist / majoritarian mechanism prone to trample liberal values and republican institutions. See Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
26. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 10
27. Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
28. It is worth noting that in Athenian democracy, the privilege of citizenship (and therefore, the right to political participation) was severely restricted. Further, within that restricted group, an ethos of meaningful equality was created by artfully separating the political realm of equals from the oikoi, the economic realm of unequals within and across households. Moreover, Athens was a relatively homogeneous political community, bound together by common ancestry, religion, language, cultural tradition, shared memories, and other bands of solidarity. Despite so many things in its favor for the optimal functioning of political equality in public assemblies, it was deemed and declared impractical and dangerous by the critics of democracy, Plato being the most penetrating and influential of all such critics.
29. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor [1983], trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
30. Plato, Protagoras, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 320d–328d.
31. Plato, Protagoras, 322b–d.
32. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927); Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927). For the contemporary relevance of the Dewey-Lippmann debate, see Mark Whipple, “The Dewey-Lippmann Debate Today: Communication Distortions, Reflective Agency, and Participatory Democracy,” Sociological Theory 23:2 (2005), 156–178.
33. Pateman, “Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and G. D. H. Cole: A Participatory Theory of Democracy,” in Participation and Democratic Theory, 22–44; Michael Walzer, “The Civil Society Argument,” in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 153–174.
34. Plato, Republic, book 6, 492–493d in John M. Cooper, ed., Plato Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1114–1115.
35. Aristotle, Politics, book III, chap.11: “The principle that the multitude ought to be supreme rather than the best …, though not free from difficulty, yet seems to contain an element of truth. For the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively” (Richard McKeon, ed., Basic Works of Aristotle [New York: Random House, 1941], 1190, 1280a.40–1281b.5).
36. While discussing his alternative to democracy, the poletia, the mixed government that would artfully balance the claims (and strengths) of monarchic, aristocratic / oligarchic, and democratic elements in a community, Aristotle singles out the democratic element as an indispensable source of legitimacy. Note that demos here refers to the poor, the nonelite, a distinct part of the political whole, not the whole itself as in the case of the “national people,” which masks the reality of class differences and stratification, and thus elides the social question.
37. This is one of the daunting challenges facing the so-called China Model as the Chinese Communist Party tries to disentangle the historically complex braiding of political legitimacy and popular sovereignty. The Chinese project to delink the two might be no more successful than Habermas’s attempt to ascertain and posit the elective affinities between popular sovereignty and public law. See Bell, The China Model; Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” [1988],” in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 463–490.
38. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835, 1840], trans. Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), 583–587.
39. For the idea of people as “fiction,” see Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). For the idea of people as “empty signifier,” see Claude LeFort, “The Question of Democracy,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9–20; Ernesto Laclau, “The ‘People’ and the Discursive Production of Emptiness,” in On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 67–128.
40. Aristotle, Politics, book III, chap. VIII, 1280a.5, in McKeon Basic Works of Aristotle, 1187.
41. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
42. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
43. On “constitutive exclusion,” see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985).
44. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 126–135.
45. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
46. Gerald N. Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Court Bring About Social Change? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
47. Terry Lynn Karl, “Imposing Consent? Electoralism versus Democratization in El Salvador,” in Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva, eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980–1985 (San Diego: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies and Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California at San Diego, 1986), 9–36, cited in Diamond, “Is the Third Wave Over?,” 21–22.
48. John Adams enshrined the concept of “a government of laws, not of men” in the 1780 Massachusetts state constitution.
49. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 7–8.
50. Diamond, Ill Winds, 39.
1. Aside from numerous invaluable conversations with my coauthors, Craig Calhoun and Charles Taylor, I have profited from my discussions with Sally Ewing, Robert Hariman, Benjamin Lee, and Liam Mayes while writing this chapter. I am especially indebted to Liam Mayes for his assistance in editing the final draft and providing suggestions for many constructive revisions and refinements.
2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
3. See Richard Hofstadter, “John C. Calhoun: The Master of the Master Class,” in his The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It [1948] (New York: Vintage, 1989), 87–118. Hofstadter cites a series of passages from the writing of Calhoun, an indefatigable pro-slavery exponent, on the unavoidability of class conflict. Here is one: “There never has existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” It would be too difficult “to trace out the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labor it was produced, and so large a share to the non-producing classes” (104).
4. In 2019, the incomes of the lowest quintile and of the second-lowest quintile were 3.1 percent and 8.3 percent of the national income, respectively. By contrast, the income of the highest quintile was 51.9 percent and that of the top five percent was 23 percent. US Census Bureau, “Income Distribution Measures Using Money Income and Equivalence-Adjusted Income: 2018 and 2019,” in Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019, table A-3, https://
5. For a conceptually rich discussion about the elites, especially the distinction between the ruling elite and the nonruling elite, see Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939); Vilfredo Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology [1901] (New York: Routledge, 2017). See also T. B. Bottomore, Elites and Society (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1966).
6. See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). There has been a rapidly growing body of scholarly literature on the precariat phenomenon in the last decade.
7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835, 1840], trans. Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), 583–587.
8. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (Washington, DC: 1871); Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet, 1946).
9. For the idea of people as “empty signifier,” see Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9–20; Ernesto Laclau, “The ‘People’ and the Discursive Production of Emptiness,” in On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 67–128. For the idea of people as “fiction,” see Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).
10. For the recurrent idea of “heartlanders” in populist discourse, see Paul Taggart, Populism (Birmingham: Open University Press, 2000).
11. On the idea of “constitutional patriotism” in the European context, see Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, ed. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. and ed. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
12. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
13. Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (New York: Routledge, 2007).
14. James Madison, Federalist 10, in Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist: A Commentary of the Constitution of the United States, Being a Collection of Essays Written in Support of the Constitution Agreed Upon September 17, 1787, by the Federal Convention [1787–1788] (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1937).
15. For an interesting discussion of Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the “sleeping sovereign,” see Richard Tuck, “Democratic Sovereignty and Democratic Government: The Sleeping Sovereign,” in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, eds., Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115–141.
16. For an insightful account of Modi’s ethnonational populist rhetoric, see Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, trans. Cynthia Schoch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), especially 112–147.
17. Charles S. Maier, “Democracy since the French Revolution,” in John Dunn, ed., Democracy: the Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 125–154.
18. This second dimension is particularly evident in the US Constitution. While noting that “the principle of representation was neither unknown to the ancients nor wholly overlooked in their political constitutions,” Madison in Federalist 63 claims, “The true distinction between these and the American governments, lies IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share in the LATTER, and not in the TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE from the administration of the FORMER” (413).
19. Marc F. Plattner, “Illiberal Democracy and the Struggle on the Right,” Journal of Democracy 30:1 (2019), 5–19.
20. This is not unique to India. The ethnoracial considerations appear to be ubiquitous in the strategic thinking and discourse surrounding electoral campaigns in the United States. Here are some media headlines about the electoral campaigns for the US presidency in 2020: “Why Is Kamala Harris Struggling with Black Voters So Much?” New York Magazine, August 13, 2019; “Pete Buttigieg Is in Bad Shape with Black Democrats. Here’s Why,” New York Times, November 21, 2019; “Buttigieg Has a Serious Latino Problem Too,” Politico, November 27, 2019; “Understanding Trump’s White Working Class Support,” American Prospect, September 3, 2019; “Can Elizabeth Warren Fix Her Problem with Black Voters?” Guardian, November 21, 2019; “Joe Biden Refocuses on White Working-Class Voters,” Time, October 23, 2019.
21. In designing and defending a mixed or balanced government as an antidote to majoritarianism, James Madison and Edmund Burke speak the language of interests rather than of identities, although the Irish question was already vexing Burke. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 168–208.
22. It should be noted that the majoritarian politics of identity rarely commands the numerical majority. This is the complex legacy of representative government. In a small country such as Hungary, which is deemed relatively homogeneous in terms of race / ethnicity, religion, and language, one might foresee how the coalition politics of majority rule can imperceptibly and possibly irreversibly slide into the majoritarian politics of identity. This is simply not the case, however, in big and diverse countries such as India and the United States.
23. David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” Essay 5, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London: Printed for A. Millar; A. Kincaid, and A. Donaldson, 1758), 20.
24. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (April 16, 1963), in his Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 77–100.
25. For more on this, see Dilip Gaonkar, “After the Fictions: Notes Towards a Phenomenology of the Multitude,” e-flux journal 58 (October 2014).
26. List of Riots, Wikipedia, n.d.
27. “Protest and Dissent in China,” Wikipedia, July 2019.
28. The impressive extent to which the US founding fathers were preoccupied with a fear of the mob while drafting and subsequently ratifying the constitution is copiously documented in The Federalist.
29. Hippolyte A. Taine, The French Revolution, vol. 2 of Les origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1876–1894). The French Revolution was published in French in 1878 and translated into English by John Durand in 1880. The first book of this volume, titled “Spontaneous Anarchy,” contains Taine’s fearful and hyperbolic account of revolutionary crowds and rioting mobs.
30. For an excellent account of crowd theory from a psychosocial perspective, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). See also Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
31. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [1960], trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking, 1963). See also Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1922], trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright Publishing,1959); José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses [1930], trans. Teresa Carey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932).
32. I have developed this point in two previous essays: Dilip Gaonkar, “After the Fictions” and “Demos Noir: Riot After Riot,” in Natasha Ginwala, Gal Kirn, and Niloufar Tajeri, eds., Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound (New York, Columbia University Press, 2021), 30–54.
33. For more on this, see Gaonkar, “After the Fictions.”
34. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
35. For an excellent account of the temporalities and tactics of the slum-dwellers in Mumbai, see Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Public Culture 14:1 (Winter 2002), 21–48. See also Partha Chatterjee, “The Politics of the Governed,” in his The Politics of the Governed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 53–78.
36. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. and forward by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
37. For a recent theorization of the centrality of assembly in “direct action” politics, see Judith Butler, “We, the People: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” in her Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 154–192.
38. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 84–85.
39. For a short discussion of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act passed by India’s parliament on December 11, 2019, see Anupama Roy, “Citizens / Non-Citizens: The Constitutive and the Dialogical,” Social Change 50:2 (2020), 278–284.
40. Jessica Winegar, “A Civilized Revolution: Aesthetics and Political Action in Egypt,” American Ethnologist 43:4 (2016), 609–622.
41. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
42. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848], trans. Samuel Moore, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (New York: Penguin Books, 1967). See the section on “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” 219–233.
43. Raphaëlle Rérolle, “Gilets jaunes: ‘Les élites parlent de fin du monde, quand nous, on parle de fin du mois,’ ” Le Monde, November 24, 2018. An American news report translated: “ ‘Macron is concerned with the end of the world,’ one Yellow Vest slogan put it. ‘We are concerned with the end of the month’ ” (Peter S. Goodman, “Inequality Fuels Rage of ‘Yellow Vests’ in Equality-Obsessed France,” New York Times, April 15, 2019).
1. See Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (New York: Viking, 2021).
2. Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
3. See David Szatmary, Shay’s Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); Leonard Richards, Shay’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Sean Condon, Shay’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
4. See Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957); David and Jeanne Heidler, The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Rise of Modern Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2018). For deeper context of the campaigns, see Harry Watson, Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
5. See Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Urban-rural and especially cross-race alliances were directly targeted by anti-populist—and antidemocratic—divide-and-conquer tactics. Thomas Frank is right to suggest, in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (New York: Metropolitan, 2020), that understanding of populists is much too widely based on the slurs of anti-populist elites and lumping of other kinds of less democratic mobilizations in with “true” populists.
6. For many populists, it is important that crowds be orderly and disciplined—thus revealing that they represent a people—or public—capable of self-government. Mobs, like the one that stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, communicate disorder (even if there are underlying organizational networks). See discussion in Craig Calhoun and Michael McQuarrie, “The Reluctant Counterpublic,” in Craig Calhoun, Roots of Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
7. In contemporary democracies, these come crucially from republicanism, but that is not the only possible source of stability, adequate recognition of minorities, and protections for individual conscience and public debate. Visions of radical populism are helpful antidotes to politics as usual and often more democratic, but they are insufficient. See Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).
8. In the United States, decisions are especially likely to be based on identifying and discriminating among absolute rights rather than mediating multiple rights or negotiating competing interests. For example, in Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court held that a right to privacy guaranteed access to abortions. It did not say that “this is a hard choice because multiple rights and interests are involved, and we think on balance that this is the best decision.” It in effect declared that the losing position(s) lost completely. The result was to dramatically increase partisan political polarization around abortion—and also violence—from those who felt they had no other recourse. It encouraged anti-abortion activists to campaign to change the members of the Supreme Court. Ironically, in the long run, the court decision has made abortion a less readily available option. See Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2021); Guido Calabrese, Ideals, Beliefs, Attitudes, and the Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990); Drew Halfmann, Doctors and Demonstrators: How Political Institutions Shape Abortion Law in the United States, Britain, and Canada (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
9. There are also efforts to combine populism and technocracy, mostly in campaign appeals. Technocratic populism can win—witness Macron in France—but it translates poorly into actual governance or policy. See Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Inverzizzi Accetti, Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
10. Jürgen Habermas quotes this phrase from the great systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, in Stuart Jeffries, “A Rare Interview with Jürgen Habermas,” Financial Times, April 30 2010. Luhmann saw it as a characteristic attitude of those faced with systems so complex that not only could they not be consciously managed, but they could not relate all their parts to each other. This meant contingency and unpredictability necessarily increased. See Social Systems [1984] (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
11. Arguably the Florentine Friar Savonarola was a pioneer of populism with his mass protests and “bonfires of the vanities.” See Craig Calhoun, “Populism and Democracy: The Long View,” in B. Vormann and M. Weiman, eds., The Emergence of Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon (London: Routledge, 2020), 227–246.
12. Ruth Braunstein, Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy across the Political Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
13. Bryan Naylor, “Read Trump’s Jan. 6 Speech, A Key Part of Impeachment Trial,” National Public Radio, February 10, 2021, https://
14. The US media ecology is distinctive, not least in the rise of Fox News and what we have called “affirmative media.” Other media controlled by Rupert Murdoch, such as Sky News, are similar. These have many precursors, but have become large-scale and in that sense mainstream media. But affirmative messaging is prominent throughout the world’s democracies.
15. New media sources such as OAN (One America News) and Newsmax benefited from Fox’s introduction of more critical perspective. See Adam Gabbatt, “The Fall of Fox?” Guardian, January 2, 2021. In competition and conflict with each other, Fox, OAN, and Newsmax are all searching for the right balance of affirmation and credibility as news media. See Brian Stetler, “How Right-Wing Networks Covered the January 6 Hearing after Months of Soft-Pedalling the Capitol Attack,” CNN Business, July 27, 2021: https://
16. See Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017); David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere (London: Hurst, 2017); Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working-Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). One prominent Labour activist in Britain goes so far as to suggest that “the modern Left loathes the working class” (Paul Embery, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class [London: Polity, 2021]). Embery is sympathetic to the Blue Labour agenda introduced by Maurice Glassman, which tries to combine socialism with socially conservative values; see I. Geary and A. Pabst, eds., Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (London: I. B. Taurus, 2015). This challenges the domination of Labour by highly educated professionals who find the themes of family, religious faith, patriotism, and local community largely anathema.
17. For a global view, see Patrick Liddard, “What Can Be Done about the Problem of Political Parties,” Wilson Center, September 2019, https://
18. This is so especially when divisions over major issues such as race and immigration coincide strongly with party preferences. In the past, parties have been internally divided, on these and other major national fault lines, which led them to do more moderating work themselves. See James A. Morone, Republic of Wrath: How American Politics Turned Tribal, from George Washington to Donald Trump (New York: Basic Books, 2020).
19. G. Bouchard and C. Taylor, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation (Quebec: Gouvernement du Québec, 2008).
20. The challenge—and the tyranny of old habits of thought—is particularly evident in left-nationalist struggles. In Catalonia, for example, investments of even radical political leaders are typically in an older ethnonational understanding of being Catalan. This excludes (or only very tepidly welcomes) half the people of Catalonia. See Eunice Romero, “La República Que Farem: Emerging Imaginaries of Migrantness and Nationhood in the Catalan Independence Movement,” XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology, Toronto 2018.
21. See M. Taylor and D. Rea, “An Analysis of Cross-Cutting between Political Cleavages,” Comparative Politics 1:4 (1969), 534–547. The idea is applied to both individual voters and party systems. For one classic, see S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, eds. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Free Press), 1–64. But it applies also to how people maintain or change beliefs, as argued by Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957). And it applies to dispute resolution in many contexts, including feuds; see Max Gluckman, “The Peace in the Feud,” Past and Present 8:1 (1955), 1–14.
22. Robert Frega observes that Social Democratic parties have suffered even more than others in this period and argues that the old social democratic compromise with capitalism needs to be rethought for social democracy to be renewed as a force for emancipation. See Roberto Frega, “The Fourth Stage of Social Democracy,” Theory and Society 50.3 (2021), 489–513.
23. Public funding of higher education is skewed toward elite and selective institutions rather than those providing the widest access. This is partly because the former produce major research. But public funding also supports the privilege of small classes and plush campuses in private universities—not least (but not only) through tax exemption. And public funders are not immune to the allure of competitive prestige.
24. Again, to varying degrees, the same can be said for Britain and most of continental Europe—though in some places such as Poland and Hungary greater pluralism was quickly countered by authoritarian leaders.
25. Though Black women face the double challenge of racism and sexism, they have benefited more from new opportunities than Black men. Why this is so is a complex question, with partial answers ranging from educational attainment to employment, violence, and mass incarceration.
26. One-fifth of all American employees work in health care and social assistance, and about 15 percent work in retail trade and accommodation and food services. See census data at https://
27. D. Boesch, R. Bleiweis, and A. Haider, “Raising the Minimum Wage Would Be Transformative for Women,” Center for American Progress, February 23, 2021, https://
28. See, among many, Paula England, “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled,” Gender and Society 24:2 (2010), 149–166, and the provocative argument that the current level of gender inequality can’t last in Robert Max Jackson, Destined for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
29. This may be one reason for the persistently greater male voter support for right-wing “populist” candidates like Donald Trump. Among many popular discussions for a phenomenon not yet adequately understood, see E. Levitz, “Men and Women Have Never Been More Politically Divided,” New York, October 19, 2020.
30. D. Boesch and S. Phadke, “When Women Lose All the Jobs: Essential Actions for a Gender-Equitable Recovery,” Center for American Progress, February 1, 2021, https://
31. Indeed, similar factors are among the sources of homophobia and violent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. Gains in both freedom and equal treatment for gay men and lesbians have been impressive. They are still contested. Rights for trans men and women are more controversial, but recognition has grown. But as LGBTQ rights and identities have been more widely recognized and protected, backlash has also grown. The causes are not mainly economic, but male disempowerment and contradictory messages about masculinity—and gender more widely—are among them.
32. See Chapter 3. This is not just a question of whether men could earn enough for women to stay out of the labor market. It is also a matter of whether men can earn enough to provide the increasingly expensive goods that media and cultural norms suggest families need. And it is complicated by status asymmetry as women attain more education and different kinds of job options.
33. Running for president of the United States in 2020, for example, the technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang proposed to pay each citizen $1,000 a month. This income would, of course, be welcomed, but it is hardly a substitute for a $50,000-a-year job. It could be nice as an extra or added security net, but it is not really a solution to transformations of work unless it is high enough to truly raise workers’ standard of living and empower workers to deal collectively with capital. This would require a much more significant transfer of wealth than rich advocates of a universal basic income seem to be contemplating. See critical analysis in Aaron Benanov, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Verso, 2020).
34. William Cummings, Joey Garrison, and Jim Sergent, “By the Numbers: President Donald Trump’s Failed Efforts to Overturn the Election,” USA Today, January 6, 2021.
35. See Sue Halpern, “The Republicans’ Wild Assault on Voting Rights in Texas and Arizona,” New Yorker, June 8, 2021. The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice publishes and updates a list of state bills to reshape elections: https://
36. The literature on voting rights is large because it is such a basic—and current—concern. See S. Abrams, C. Anderson, K. M. Kruse, H. C. Richardson, and H. C. Thompson, Voter Suppression in US Elections (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020); Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Gilda Daniels, Uncounted (New York: New York University Press, 2020). On the role of courts, see L. Goldstone, On Account of Race (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2020). For an account of the problems and the struggle by the most important voting rights campaigner today, Stacey Abrams, Our Time Is Now (New York: Holt, 2020).
37. Brennan Center for Justice, “Voting Rights Roundup, May 2021,” https://
38. See “The Spreading Scourge of Voter Suppression,” The Economist, October 10, 2020. On the comparative integrity of elections more generally see the website of the Electoral Integrity Project (www
39. Michael Barajas and the Texas Observer, “Texas and the Long Tail of Voter Suppression,” The Nation, October 16, 2020.
40. This practice was imported from the United States to the United Kingdom by the Conservative government, ostensibly to reduce voter fraud—though in fact there was little evidence of any fraud. See Caroline Davies, “Conservatives Accused of Suppressing Voters’ Rights over Leaked Photo ID Plans,” The Guardian, October 13, 2019. See also Pippa Norris, “The UK Scores Worst in Electoral Integrity in Western Europe. Here’s Why,” Democratic Audit, March 30, 2016, www
41. When votes cannot be suppressed, other approaches to subverting democracy are common. Majorities in partisan state legislatures have sought to maintain their grip by denying funds and power to popularly elected governors. See Richard Fausset and Trip Gabriel, “North Carolina’s Partisan Rift Widens in Fight Over Governor’s Powers,” New York Times, December 15, 2016.
42. This situation has been getting worse for years. See Jonathan Rauch, “How American Politics Went Insane,” The Atlantic, July 2016; T. E. Mann and N. J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse than It Looks (New York: Basic Books, 2016); P. Norris, S. Cameron, and T. Wynter, eds., Electoral Integrity in America: Securing Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). And, on the still more extreme situation since the 2020 election, see Lee Drutman, “America Is Now the Divided Republic the Framers Feared,” The Atlantic, January 2, 2020; P. Trubowitz and P. Harris, “The End of the American Century? Slow Erosion of the Domestic Sources of Usable Power,” International Affairs 95:3 (May 2019), 619–639. For an academic review of consequences for Congress, see S. Binder, “The Dysfunctional Congress,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015), 85–101.
43. Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (London: One World, 2021).
44. The BLM movement had been started in response to the 2013 killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman—and Zimmerman’s acquittal. Christopher J. LeBron, The Making of Black Lives Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
45. For a journalistic summary of the findings of attorneys for the US Department of Justice, see Tyler Sonnemaker, “Portland Police Officers Used Force More Than 6,000 Times against Protesters Last year,” Business Insider, March 20, 2021.
46. See Mike Baker, Thomas Fuller, and Sergio Olmos, “Federal Agents Push into Portland Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority,” New York Times, July 25, 2020.
47. For a useful review, see Jessica M. Eaglin, “To ‘Defund’ the Police,” Stanford Law Review 73 (June 2021).
48. The prominence of calls to defund is in one sense ironic. Black Americans have been disproportionate victims not only of police violence but of police neglect. That is, police budgets have placed a much greater priority or securing the safety of central business districts and well-off, mostly White, residential areas. Black Americans, and in varying degrees other minorities, suffer constant insecurity as a result.
49. Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013); Abigail R. Hall and Christopher Coyne, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.)
50. Police work is one of the few areas of service work that provides good wages and job security to the kinds of workers who might previously have had more options in manufacturing. Police benefit from strong unions. But these sometimes unwisely (and often at public expense) protect racist and violent officers. Noam Scheiber, Farah Stockman and J. David Goodman, “How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts,” New York Times, June 6, 2020; Samantha Michael, “The Infuriating History of Why Police Unions Have So Much Power,” Mother Jones, September / October 2020.
51. A proposal was brought in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety. It failed in the 2021 election. Likewise, New York City voters elected a former police officer as mayor, defeating advocates of police reform or defunding. See Mitch Smith and Tim Arango, “ ‘We Need Policemen’: Even in Liberal Cities Voters Reject Scaled-Back Policing,” New York Times, November 3, 2021.
52. Angela Davis has been an early and persistent critic; see Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003). Among many studies, see Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History, 97.3 (December 2010), 703–734; Peter Enns, Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime; Franklin E. Zimmring, The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
53. Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Inside Private Prisons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Shane Bauer, American Prison (London: Penguin, 2019). On putting privatization of prisons in the context of wider privatization of public institutions during the neoliberal era, see Lawrence Baines, The Privatization of America’s Institutions (Bern: Peter Lang, 2019).
54. Indeed, rates of incarceration and the high costs of medicine are the two areas in which the United States most clearly leads the world. On the latter, see Andrew W. Mulcahy, Christopher M. Whaley, Mahlet Gizaw, Daniel Schwam, Nathaniel Edenfield, and Alejandro U. Becerra-Ornelas, International Prescription Drug Price Comparisons: Current Empirical Estimates and Comparisons with Previous Studies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, RR-2956-ASPEC, 2021). RAND found identical drugs cost on average 2.56 times more in the United States than elsewhere.
55. Elizabeth Warren has been a prominent advocate of ending private prisons. See the work of the nonprofit organization Abolish Private Prisons at its website: https://
56. Anne Höhn and Nina Werkhäuser, “Bundeswehr Remains under Fire for Far-Right Extremism,” Deutsche Welle (DW), March 23, 2021. Penetration of the police is significant but less organized. See Rob Schmitz, “With Far-Right Extremism on the Rise, Germany Investigates Its Police,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, December 10, 2020, https://
57. Karl Evers-Hillstrom, “Most Expensive Ever: 2020 Election Cost $14.4 Billion,” Open Secrets, February 11, 2021, https://
58. Adam Payne and Will Martin, “The 21 Biggest Donors to the Brexit Campaign,” Business Insider, May 8, 2017.
59. Catie Edmondson, “ ‘Rogue’ U.S. Agency Used Racial Profiling to Investigate Commerce Dept. Employees, Report Says,” New York Times, July 16, 2021.
60. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
61. For an affirmative account of this “new” mode of business, see Thomas Davenport and John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). For critical reflections, see Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold (London: Atlantic Books, 2017); Matthew B. Crawford, The World beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); John Lanchester, “You Are the Product,” London Review of Books 39 (August 2017), 16–17.
62. Arizona Republicans also embraced a rumor that Chinese interference could be spotted by traces of bamboo in ballots. Sam Levine, “Arizona Republicans Hunt for Bamboo-Laced China Ballots in 2020 ‘Audit’ Effort,” The Guardian, May 6, 2021; Zacchary Petrizzio, “Bamboo Ballots Don’t Exist, Manufacturer Says, as Arizona Auditors Search for ‘Watermarks,’ ” Salon, June 23, 2021.
63. Nicholas Reimann, “Arizona Audit Cost Trump Supporters Nearly $6 Million—Only to Assert Biden Won by Even More,” Forbes, September 24, 2021.
64. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
65. Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker, Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Jay David Bolter, “Social Media Are Ruining Political Discourse,” The Atlantic, May 2019.
66. For research on Twitter, see Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359:6380 (2018), 1146–1151.
67. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927),
68. For a fuller discussion of the advantages of such local organization, as well as a discussion of examples of this local action or consultation in the United States and the European Union, see Charles Taylor, Patrizia Nanz, and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor, Reconstructing Democracy: How Citizens Are Building from the Bottom Up (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). See also Peter Plastrik, Madeleine Taylor, and John Cleveland, Connecting to Change the World (Washington DC: Island Press, 2014). For a discussion of local projects in the style of Saul Alinsky, see Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
69. See James and Deborah Fallows’s interesting and informative book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America (New York: Pantheon, 2018), which documents the rich fund of ideas and entrepreneurial initiatives that exist in a large number of local communities in the United States. They regret the fact that these are not complemented by supportive action on the part of the federal government. We very much agree that some synergy between the two is essential to the rebuilding of American democracy.
Mention might also be made of direct action, such as the projects initiated among Indignados in Spain, which acted to prevent the repossession of homes by banks after those living there had defaulted on their mortgages. Many of these efforts were highly successful, and one of the leaders involved was subsequently elected mayor of Barcelona. This kind of “extra-legal” action can help the formation of effective political parties, like Podemos.
70. To be precise, inequality inside countries increased. Inequality among countries was reduced somewhat, mainly by advancing economies in Asia. Even though inequality went up in China, too, the country’s overall growth meant that millions of people could escape poverty. See Branko Milanovich, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
71. For a discussion of the ways that one-sided emphasis on markets undermined and changed provision of public goods, see LaDawn Haglund, Limiting Resources: Market Led Reform and the Transformation of Public Goods (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010).
72. Christopher Ingraham, “Covid-19 Has Killed More Police Officers This Year than All Other Causes Combined, Data Shows,” Washington Post, September 2, 2020.
73. See Paula England, “Emerging Theories of Care Work,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005), 381–399; Mignon Duffy, Making Care Count:: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
74. Vicente Navarro, “Consequences of the Privatized Funding of Medical Care and of the Privatized Electoral Process,” American Journal of Public Health 100:3 (2010), 399–402.
75. Bianca Quilantan, “New Poll Finds Majority of Voters Support Public Education,” Politico, February 3, 2020; Jocelyn Kiley, “Most Continue to Say Ensuring Health Care Coverage Is Government’s Responsibility,” Pew Research, October 3, 2018, https://
76. Pew Research, “Little Public Support for Reductions in Federal Spending,” April 11, 2019, https://
77. For one influential set of proposals, see Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). A related issue, too complex to discuss here, is how mechanisms for tax avoidance fuel a much wider illicit capitalist economy on a global scale, mixing funds off the books for tax reasons with the finance of trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people.
78. Alan Rappeport, “Finance Leaders Reach Global Tax Deal Aimed at Ending Profit Shifting,” New York Times, June 5, 2021.
79. See James Tobin, “A Proposal for International Monetary Reform,” Eastern Economic Journal 4:3–4 (July–October 1978), 153–159.
80. There is a large literature on the New Deal, but also a superb and accessible online introduction curated by UC Berkeley geography professor Richard Walker: https://
81. Craig Calhoun and Benjamin Y. Fong, eds., The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).
82. Craig Calhoun, “Occupy Wall Street in Perspective,” British Journal of Sociology, 64:1 (2013), 26–38.
83. See “House Resolution Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal,” 116th Congress, 1st Session, February 7, 2019, https://
84. The Green New Deal Group at Britain’s New Economics Foundation issued its own report in 2008: Andrew Simms, Ann Pettifor, Caroline Lucas, Charles Secrett, Colin Hines, Jeremy Legget, Larry Elliott, Richard Murphy, and Tony Juniper, “A Green New Deal,” July 20, 2008, https://
85. More books and articles are being published every day. Some of the most important are Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020); Jeremy Rifkin, The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth (New York: St. Martins, 2019); Larry Jordan, The Green New Deal: Why We Need It And Can’t Live Without It—And No, It’s Not Socialism! (Chula Vista, CA: PageTurner Books, 2019); Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, A Planet to Win (London: Verso 2020). Some authors, it should be said, focus more on the image of having a new war to win against climate—echoing the top-down mobilization of World War II more than the broad combination of forces in the New Deal.
86. See Eugene T. Richardson, Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020); Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds (New York: Farrar, Strauss Giroux, 2020).
1. Larry Diamond, “Democratic Regression in Comparative Perspective: Scope, Methods, and Causes,” Democratization 28:1 (2020).
2. By virtue of its inherently precarious balance, politeia unfortunately remains susceptible to corruption over time.
3. For example, Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020); Larry Diamond, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (New York: Penguin, 2019); Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019); David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2019).
4. With every country fixated on the immeasurable benefits of the “knowledge economy,” the centrality of universities has never been greater. But their campuses are not the prominent sites of protest they were in the past. Universities are indispensable as sites of research, training, and credentialing. But they are largely harnessed to serve as the nexus between business and techno-science. The traditional role of universities as the protected space of social critique and emancipatory discourse has been radically diminished.
5. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. Letter of Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, November 13, 1787, accessible at Founders Archives, https://
7. This was the great theme of Niklas Luhmann; see, among many works, his Social Systems (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Theory of Society (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). Jürgen Habermas offered an account of modernity—and the potential for democracy—as necessarily accepting the separation of systemic management by “nonlinguistic steering media” from lived experience, including that of political freedom, in the “lifeworld.” See his Theory of Communication Action (Boston: Beacon, 1987), esp. vol. 2, part 6.
8. For an extensive account of the relationship between democracy and the emergence of the neoliberal order, see Chapter 3.
9. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
10. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There an Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009).
11. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
12. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
13. David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics (London: C. Hurst, 2017).
14. The asymmetrical social status between mental work and physical work has been in existence in some form or other for a very long time—likely since the division of labor reached a certain level of complexity in the earliest settled agricultural communities. Its ideological justification can be found in philosophy as well as theology in every civilization. The Brahmins of ancient India are a perfect social embodiment of this ideology in operation. With the onset of the bourgeois revolution and the changes in the modes of social reproduction it wrought, mental labor came to enjoy not only higher social status relative to physical work, but increasingly disproportionate material rewards as well.
15. When one examines these social factors, education, with the credentials it confers, stands out as primary and preeminent. For instance, self-investment often entails acquiring appropriate skills and training through educational institutions that confer credentials. Further, educational institutions themselves are hierarchically ranked and the credentials they bestow are differentially valued. Thus, education has been transformed from a primary social good to which all citizens should have reasonable access to a competitive positional good to rank, value, and differentiate individuals and groups from each other.
16. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
17. For instance, in 2019, Apple directly employed 147,000 people and reported a revenue of $275 billion compared with Walmart’s 2.2 million direct employees with a revenue of $524 billion. The more revealing figures, however, pertain to revenue and profitability per employee: while Apple workers each generated $1.9 million in revenue and $403,328 in profit, their Walmart counterparts each generated only $246,415 in revenue and $8,752 in profit.
18. The ratification process of the US Constitution went from September 1787 to May 1790, and the Bill of Rights was ratified in December 1791.
19. Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 473.
20. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Other America,” speech at Grosse Pointe High School, March 14, 1968; transcript at https://