Description
The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities. Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsList of ContributorsPart 1: The Strains of Governance1. The Political Crisis of the American State: The Unsustainable State in a Time of Unraveling, Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King2. Is Inequality a Threat to Democracy?, John FerejohnPart 2: From Nineteenth CenturyLegacies to Twentieth Century Orthodoxy3. The Resilient Power of the States Across the Long Nineteenth Century: An Inquiry into a Pattern of American Governance, Gary Gerstle4. The First New Federalism and the Development of the Modern American State: Patchwork, Reconstitution or Transition?, Kimberley S Johnson5. The Missing State in Postwar American Political Thought, Desmond King and Marc StearsPart 3: The Modern American State6. No Class War: Economic Inequality and the American Public, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs7. Economic Inequality and Political Representation, Larry Bartels8. Promoting Inequality: The Politics of Higher Education Policy in an Era of Conservative Governance, Suzanne Mettler9. Moving Feminist Activists Inside the American State: The Rise of a State Movement Intersection and its Effects on State Policy, Lee Ann Banaszak10. From Kanye West to Barack Obama: Black Youth, the State and Political Alienation, Cathy J. CohenPart 4: The Inherited State Moving Forward11. American State Building: The Theoretical Challenge, Desmond King and Robert Lieberman12. A Historian's Reflection on the Unsustainable American State, Liz Cohen13. Taking Stock, Stephen Skowronek
