Horizon Information Portal

HSPLS site

eBooks/Audiobooks

Reading Program

The society of equals / Pierre Rosanvallon ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer.

by Rosanvallon, Pierre, 1948-

View full image

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, c2013.

Equality -- Sociological aspects.

Social structure.

9780674724594 (alk. paper)

0674724593 (alk. paper)

376 pages ; 22 cm

The invention of equality -- The pathologies of equality -- The century of redistribution -- The great reversal -- The society of equals : a preliminary outline.

Since the 1980s, society's wealthiest members have claimed an ever-expanding share of income and property. It has been a true counterrevolution, says Pierre Rosanvallon--the end of the age of growing equality launched by the American and French revolutions. And just as significant as the social and economic factors driving this contemporary inequality has been a loss of faith in the ideal of equality itself. An ambitious transatlantic history of the struggles that, for two centuries, put political and economic equality at their heart, The Society of Equals calls for a new philosophy of social relations to reenergize egalitarian politics. For eighteenth-century revolutionaries, equality meant understanding human beings as fundamentally alike and then creating universal political and economic rights. Rosanvallon sees the roots of today's crisis in the period 1830-1900, when industrialized capitalism threatened to quash these aspirations. By the early twentieth century, progressive forces had begun to rectify some imbalances of the Gilded Age, and the modern welfare state gradually emerged from Depression-era reforms. But new economic shocks in the 1970s began a slide toward inequality that has only gained momentum in the decades since. -- Publsiher website.

Horizon Information Portal 3.25_9884

Powered by Dynix

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal