After World War II, states on both sides of the Atlantic enacted comprehensive social benefits to protect working people and constrain capitalism. A widely shared consensus specifically linked social welfare to democratic citizenship, upholding greater equality as the glue that held nations together. Though the "two Wests," Europe and the United States, differ in crucial respects, they share a common history of social rights, democratic participation, and welfare capitalism. But in a new age of global inequality, welfare-state retrenchment, and economic austerity, can capitalism and democracy still coexist? In this book, leading historians and social scientists rethink the history of social democracy and the welfare state in the United States and Europe in light of the global transformations of the economic order. Separately and together, they ask how changes in the distribution of wealth reshape the meaning of citizenship in a post-welfare-state era. They explore how the harsh effects of austerity and inequality influence democratic participation. In individual essays as well as interviews with Ira Katznelson and Frances Fox Piven, contributors from both sides of the Atlantic explore the fortunes of the welfare state. They discuss distinct national and international settings, speaking to both local particularities and transnational and transatlantic exchanges. Covering a range of topics-the lives of migrant workers, gender and the family in the design of welfare policies, the fate of the European Union, and the prospects of social movements-Democracy and the Welfare State is essential reading on what remains of twentieth-century social democracy amid the onslaught of neoliberalism and right-wing populism and where this legacy may yet lead us.

The notion of an American Century has fallen out of favor in recent years historians prefer to focus on the United States as part of a transatlantic community. The contributors to this volume edited by R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna seek to understand how the exercise of American power was in crucial ways shaped and limited by the historic ties of the United States to Europe. They evaluate the impact of the "American Century" (as publisher Henry R. Luce named it in 1941) from Woodrow Wilson's dream of a new world order, to Cold War economic policies, to more recent American cultural imperialism and its immediate descendent, American-led globalization.The American Century in Europe gathers an international group of scholars who explore the ways twentieth-century American power (diplomatic, cultural, and economic) has been felt across the Atlantic. The authors demonstrate that the American Century was marked less by American hegemony than by reciprocal influence between the United States and Europe. The scale of American wealth certainly guaranteed influence abroad, but as the essays demonstrate, the American thirst for trade just as surely opened America's borders to cultures from around the world."

After World War II, states on both sides of the Atlantic enacted comprehensive social benefits to protect working people and constrain capitalism. A widely shared consensus specifically linked social welfare to democratic citizenship, upholding greater equality as the glue that held nations together. Though the "two Wests," Europe and the United States, differ in crucial respects, they share a common history of social rights, democratic participation, and welfare capitalism. But in a new age of global inequality, welfare-state retrenchment, and economic austerity, can capitalism and democracy still coexist? In this book, leading historians and social scientists rethink the history of social democracy and the welfare state in the United States and Europe in light of the global transformations of the economic order. Separately and together, they ask how changes in the distribution of wealth reshape the meaning of citizenship in a post-welfare-state era. They explore how the harsh effects of austerity and inequality influence democratic participation. In individual essays as well as interviews with Ira Katznelson and Frances Fox Piven, contributors from both sides of the Atlantic explore the fortunes of the welfare state. They discuss distinct national and international settings, speaking to both local particularities and transnational and transatlantic exchanges. Covering a range of topics-the lives of migrant workers, gender and the family in the design of welfare policies, the fate of the European Union, and the prospects of social movements-Democracy and the Welfare State is essential reading on what remains of twentieth-century social democracy amid the onslaught of neoliberalism and right-wing populism and where this legacy may yet lead us.