Search results for ""Author Richard Lachmann""
Verso Books First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers
The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the United States will not be able to sustain its global dominance. He contrasts America's relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands' similarly short primacy and Britain's far longer era of leadership.Decline in all those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. Rather, decline is the product of elites' success in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. Not only are ordinary people harmed, but also capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests and adopt policies and make investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world.Conflicts among elites and challenges by non-elites determine the timing and mould the contours of decline. Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to present-day paralysis combined with neoliberal plunder, explains the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance's cannibalisation of the US economy.
£25.00
John Wiley and Sons Ltd What is Historical Sociology?
Sociology began as a historical discipline, created by Marx, Weber and others, to explain the emergence and consequences of rational, capitalist society. Today, the best historical sociology combines precision in theory-construction with the careful selection of appropriate methodologies to address ongoing debates across a range of subfields. This innovative book explores what sociologists gain by treating temporality seriously, what we learn from placing social relations and events in historical context. In a series of chapters, readers will see how historical sociologists have addressed the origins of capitalism, revolutions and social movements, empires and states, inequality, gender and culture. The goal is not to present a comprehensive history of historical sociology; rather, readers will encounter analyses of exemplary works and see how authors engaged past debates and their contemporaries in sociology, history and other disciplines to advance our understanding of how societies are created and remade across time. This illuminating book is designed for use in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses as an introduction to historical sociology and as a guide to employing historical analysis across the discipline.
£15.99