In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing.

This essay, written in memory of Erik Olin Wright, explores the possibility of liberal socialism. Wright sought to rescue both liberalism and socialism from their demonstrated capacity for depredation. His legacy challenges reformers to proceed with the audacity of real, and realistic, utopianism together with an awareness that, unfortunately, the obverse of an appealing utopianism always beckons.

This article is a personal and professional meditation on Zolberg's work regarding pluralism, heterogeneity, and his relation to The New School, historically situated.

This paper emplaces arguments about affirmative action today inside a history of racial harms inflicted by public policy during the last heyday of southern power in Congress in the 1930s and 1940s. Showing how social programs utilized occupational exclusions and administrative decentralization to protect the Jim Crow racial order, it argues that assertive remedies can be found that connect the ambitions for affirmative action announced by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University in 1965 with the principles enunciated by Justice Lewis (...) Powell in the Baake case in 1978. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between the expulsion of Jews from medieval England and France and state building, geo-politics, regime styles, and taxation in these countries. Jews were evicted as a result of attempts by kings to manage royal insecurity, refashion relations between state and society, and build more durable systems of taxation within the territories they claimed as theirs. As they engaged in state building and extended their ties, often conflictual, to key societal and political actors, Jews became financially (...) less important but more visible as outsiders, becoming a liability for the crown. Similar mechanisms were at work despite important differences distinguishing England’s growing regime of rights and representation and France’s emergent absolutist patrimonialism. (shrink)