Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil. It inspires hymns to the prosperity it enables, manifestos about the poor it leaves behind, and diatribes for its corrosion of morality. In The Wisdom of Money, one of the world's great essayists guides us through the rich commentary that money has generated since ancient times-both the passions and the resentments-as he builds an unfashionable defense of the worldly wisdom of the bourgeoisie. Bruckner begins with the worshippers and the despisers. Sometimes they are the same people-priests, for example, who venerate the poor from within churches of opulence and splendor. This hypocrisy endures in our secular world, he says, not least in his own France, where it is de rigueur even among the rich to feign indifference to money. It is better to speak plainly about money in the old American fashion, in Bruckner's view. A little more honesty would allow us to see through the myths of money's omnipotence but also the dangers of the aristocratic, ideological, and religious systems of thought that try to put money in its place. This does not mean we should emulate the mega-rich with their pathologies of consumption, competition, and narcissistic philanthropy. But we could do worse than defy three hundred years of derision from novelists and poets to embrace the unromantic bourgeois virtues of work, security, and moderate comfort. It is wise to have money, Bruckner tells us, and wise to think about it critically.

This book critically engages with the proliferation of literature on postcapitalism, which is rapidly becoming an urgent area of inquiry, both in academic scholarship and in public life. It collects the insights from scholars working across the field of Critical International Political Economy to interrogate how we might begin to envisage a political economy of postcapitalism. The authors foreground the agency of workers and other capitalist subjects, and their desire to engage in a range of radical experiments in decommodification and democratisation both in the workplace and in their daily lives. It includes a broad range of ideas including the future of social reproduction, human capital circulation, political Islam, the political economy of exclusion and eco-communities. Rather than focusing on the ending of capitalism as an implosion of the value-money form, this book focuses on the dream of equal participation in the determination of people's shared collective destiny.

This is the study of the status of intellectuals in the People's Republic of China during and after the events of Tiananmen Square. Currently intellectuals find themselves on the cusp of change as the socialist state monopoly on academia, scientific and technical research is yielding to market pressures. Universities must be, at least partially, self-sustaining. Entrepreneurial niches, outside of state control, are opening for intellectuals as industry privatizes. The entire society has shifted its focus from ideology to material wealth. These dramatic changes have forced choices on China's thought workers. English-Lueck, in conducting over a hundred interviews, highlights the choices and constraints of nonestablishment Chinese intellectuals at the end of the 20th century as they establish a new identity for themselves, and perhaps even for China.

How far have we really progressed toward gender equality in the United States? The answer is, "not far enough." This engaging and accessible work, aimed at students studying gender and social inequality, provides new insight into the uneven and stalled nature of the gender revolution in the twenty-first century. Honing in on key institutions-the family, higher education, the workplace, religion, the military, and sports-key scholars in the field look at why gender inequality persists. All contributions are rooted in new and original research and introductory and concluding essays provide a broad overview for students and others new to the field. The volume also explores how to address current inequities through political action, research initiatives, social mobilization, and policy changes. Conceived of as a book for gender and society classes with a mix of exciting, accessible, pointed pieces, Gender in the Twenty-First Century is an ideal book for students and scholars alike.

Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City and this book is about them, the so-called mole people. They live alone and in communities, in subway tunnels and below subway platforms and this fascinating study presents how and why people move underground, who they are, and what they have to say about their lives and the "topside" world they've left behind.

This book examines the heart of the samurai ethos known as the `cult of the sword' and its relationship to Zen Buddhism. Surveying the origins of the warrior class, the ancient traditions of swords and swordmaking, Zen meditation techniques, and aspects of the Japanese martial arts, King reveals how this surprising alliance came about, and its implications for Japanese society.

'I can't believe I bought a toaster with no bagel setting!' 'Irritating... just done a massive pre-cleaner clean, and they've just texted to say they're not coming!' Have you ever had to buy cava because the shop's out of champagne? Ever put too much wasabi on your sushi? Or maybe your latest lifestyle post on social media didn't get enough likes? Well, the struggles are real and you're not alone. Cheekily illustrated throughout, this book showcases these and other first-world problems that might find you wincing in self-recognition.

Based on two unique survey studies of elites in Norway, this book examines whether elite attitudes towards central national issues have changed in the wake of international and national events and developments since 2000. The chapters examine elite integration and relations between elites and citizens in Norway as a means to discuss the continued viability of the Nordic welfare state model. This insight into how elites relate to central issues in Norwegian society and how they look upon citizens' political interest and competence in general, will be of interest to academics within sociology and political science, as well as journalists and commentators and policy makers.

Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's six published novels against the background of a 'long 18th century' that stretched from the Restoration to the Regency. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. Giffin's focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation, and reflection on experience.

The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists. In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

Identity politics has been a smear for decades. The right use it to lament the loss of free speech, while many on the left bemoan it as the end of class politics. It has been used to dismiss movements such as Black Lives Matter and brought seemingly progressive people into the path of fascism. It has emboldened the march of the transphobes. In Fractured, the authors move away from the ahistorical temper of the identity politics debate. Instead of crudely categorising race, gender and sexuality as fixed and immutable identities, or forcing them under the banner of 'diversity', they argue that these categories are inseparable from the history of class struggle under British and US capitalism. Through an appraisal of pivotal historical moments in Britain and the US, including Black feminist and anticolonial traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, the authors question the assumptions of the culture war, offering a refreshing and reasoned way to understand how historical class struggles were formed and continue to determine the possibilities for new forms of solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world.

Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha's Vineyard. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group.

Author and TV commentator Lawrence Otis Graham, one of the nation's most prominent spokesmen on race and class, spent six years interviewing the wealthiest black families in America. He includes historical photos of a people that made their first millions in the 1870s. Graham tells who's in and who's not in the group today with separate chapters on the elite in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Nashville, and New Orleans. A new Introduction explains the controversy that the book elicited from both the black and white communities.

There are two narratives of the American class structure: one of a country with boundless opportunities for upward mobility and one of a rigid class system in which the rich stay rich while the poor stay poor. Each of these narratives holds some truth, but each overlooks another. In Privilege Lost, Jessi Streib traces the lives of over 100 youth born into the upper-middle-class. Following them for over ten years as they transition from teens to young adults, Streib examines who falls from the upper-middle-class, how, and why don't they see it coming. In doing so, she reveals the patterned ways that individuals' resources and identities push them onto mobility paths-and the complicated choices youth make between staying true to themselves and staying in their class position. Engaging and eye-opening, Privilege Lost brings to life the stories of the downwardly mobile and highlights what they reveal about class, privilege, and American family life.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of caste in contemporary India. With contributions from scholars like Valerian Rodrigues, B.B. Mohanty, Surinder Jodhka, and Anand Teltumbde, it discusses wide-ranging themes like the trajectory of caste in post-independence India; Dalits and cultural identity; the paradox of being a Dalit woman; caste violence and social mobility; Ambedkar’s quest for the right of social equality; social security for the inclusive development of Dalits; discrimination and exclusion of Dalits in education; and Dalit merit and institutional injustice, and presents an overview of the struggles for distributive justice in India. This volume will be of importance to scholars and researchers of Dalit studies, social justice, exclusion studies, caste studies, affirmative action, political studies, sociology, social anthropology, and South Asian politics.

Long Lives Are for the Rich is the title of a silent ominous program that affects the lives of millions of people. In all developed countries disadvantaged and, especially, poor people die much earlier than the most advantaged. During these shorter lives they suffer ten to twenty years longer from disabilities or chronic disease. This does not happen accidentally: health inequalities – including those between healthy and unhealthy life styles – are mainly caused by social inequalities that are reproduced over the life course. This crucial function of the life course has become painfully visible during its neoliberal reorganization since the early 1980s. Studies about aging over the life course, from birth to death, show the inhumane consequences as people get older. In spite of the enormous wealth that has been piled up in the US for a dwindling percentage of the population, there has been growing public indifference about the needs of those in jobs with low pay and high stress, but also about citizens from a broad middle class who can hardly afford high quality education or healthcare. However, this ominous program affects all: recent mortality rates show that all Americans, including the rich, are unhealthier and dying earlier than citizens of other developed countries. Moreover, the underlying social inequalities are tearing the population apart with nasty consequences for all citizens, including the rich. Although the public awareness of the consequences has been growing, neoliberal policies remain tempting for the economic and political elites of the developed world because of the enormous wealth that is flowing to the top. All this poses urgent questions of social justice. Unfortunately, the predominant studies of social justice along the life course help to reproduce these inequalities by neglecting them. This book analyzes the main dynamics of social inequality over the life course and proposes a theory of social justice that sketches a way forward for a country that is willing to invest in its greatest resource: the creative potential of its population.

The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of today's working class. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing modern laborers have deep roots in the history of worker exploitation in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the United States. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, from the eighteenth century to the present, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine such topics as vagrancy laws in the Early Republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers. The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today.

Provides the most comprehensive account since the early 1960s of South Africa's "black middle class". 2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The "rise of the black middle class" is one of the most visible aspects of post-apartheid society in South Africa. Yet while it has been a major actor in the country's democratic reshaping, analysis of its role has been all but lacking. Rather, the image presented by the media has been of "black diamonds", consumers of the products of advanced industrial economies, and of corrupt "tenderpreneurs" who use their political connections to obtain contracts. This book seeks to complicate that picture with a much-needed analysis that recounts its historical development in colonial society prior to 1994, before examining the size, shape andstructure of the new black middle class in contemporary South Africa and its relation to its counterparts in the Global South. Roger Southall is Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Jacana

An insidious snobbery has taken root in parts of progressive Britain. Working-class voters have flexed their political muscles and helped to change the direction of the country, but in doing so they have been met with disdain and even abuse from elites in politics, culture and business. They have been derided as uneducated, bigoted turkeys voting for Christmas, as Empire apologists patriotic to the point of delusion. At election time, we hear a lot about 'levelling up the Red Wall'. But when the votes have been counted, what can actually be done to meet the very real concerns of the 'left behind' in the UK's post-industrial towns? In these once vibrant hubs of progress, working-class voters now face the prospect of being minimised or ridiculed in cultural life, economically marginalised and abandoned educationally. In this rousing polemic, David Skelton explores the roots and reality of this new snobbery, calling for an end to the divisive culture war and the creation of a new politics of the common good, empowering workers, remaking the economy and placing communities centre stage. Above all, he argues that we now have a once-in-a-century opportunity to bring about permanent change.

The great issues and conflicts of the early seventeenth century were played out not only on the stages of the Court and Parliament, and, latterly, on the battlefield, but within the confines of the family. Originally published in 1984, in this pioneering study of the Verney family, based on more than 10,000 family letters and papers, Professor Miriam Slater shows how a family of country gentry lived and behaved in a time of political and social crisis. Most of their energies were directed within the family, their concerns with marriage and children, with relationships between members of the Verney clan, with managing their estates and property. They emerge as real people with passions and hatreds, made to live their lives by correspondence when the head of the family was forced to live abroad as an exile and casualty of the political tumults. But their misfortunes have created a unique archive which allows the author to delve deep into the very heart of their personal lives, and to create an extraordinary collective portrait of a family in times of troubles. Professor Slater describes and analyses the way in which Verney family members actually treated each other, and gives an account of their ideas - on marriage, from both the male and female points of view; on the roles of children and parents; on the relationships among adult siblings; on the place of servants within the family. She offers a detailed and systematic examination of family psychological dynamics, and the values, attitudes and goals which affected individual behaviour. She also moves beyond individual idiosyncrasies by linking the nature of personal interaction within the family to the wider social structures of the society, including laws of inheritance, patriarchal control, the different treatment of men and women, and financial arrangements and family strategies.

Originally published in 1974, the conclusions of the book are based on intensive field-work during 1963-66 in a village in south-east Rajasthan, India. Although the marriages of 158 boys and 163 girls were studied, the relevance of the conclusions drawn extends far beyond the village and its region since it reveals the changing themes and values in Indian society at the time. The perceptive analysis of rites and ceremonies of marriage further illuminates the central problem of the book - how the themes of the Dharmasastras are interpreted and acted upon in village life and what kinds of reinforcements and incentives to change they provide to the various units of social structure. The author contends that the series of marriage rites manifest the continuity of tradition, a ritual epitomisation of caste interdependence and means of systematic social advancement. At the time ritual idioms and patterns of social exchange were beginning to change, more often in observance than in content. Traditional sources of status aggrandisement continued to provide new pathways to the forces of modernisation and unveil several clues to the innovative strategies of change. This scholarly study filled the need for a realistic appraisal of the relationship between marriage practices, religious values and the changing social structure.

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers' everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the 'other life' in today's Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of 'habitability', commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.