This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of as liberalism—the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama—began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of WWI, in disillusionment with American society. In the 1920s, the first thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and right. The aim of liberalism’s founders—such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken—was to create an American version of the aristocracy long associated with European statism. Critical of mass democracy and middle-class capitalism, liberals despised the businessman’s pursuit of profit as well as the conventional individual’s pursuit of pleasure; and in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself in the scornful critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of a recently elevated middle-class culture that frightened the leaders of the New Class, who took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights. The neo-Malthusianism that emerged from the 1960s did not aim to control the breeding habits of the lower classes, as its eugenicist precursors had done, but to mock and restrain the buying habits of the middle class. Today’s brand of liberalism, led by Barack Obama, has displaced the old Main Street private-sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public-sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of elite style and taste.

The author of this stunning set of essays on politics and public policy makes crystal clear the meaning of the title. "The revolutionaries of contemporary America do not seek to redistribute privilege from those who have it to those who do not. These radicals wish to arrange a transfer of power from those elites who now exercise it to another elite, namely themselves, who do not. This aspiring elite is of the same race (white), the same class (upper middle and upper), and the same educational background (the best colleges and universities) as those they wish to displace." Wildavsky's bracing work takes a close look at these elites, who probably make up little more than one percent of the population. He sees their common denominator as hostility toward the masses, anti-American attitudes, derision of authority, and a belief in participatory rather than representative politics. The author carries through these themes in a variety of essays on black-white racial relations, social work orientations and black militancy, the politics of budgetary reform, elite and mass trends in the political party system, and the substitution of bureaucratic for democratic modes of advancing the policy process. This work is, in short, vintage Wildavsky: tough minded, spirited, and plain-spoken political analysis. In his new Introduction, Irving Louis Horowitz examines what has changed and what continues to be salient in Wildavsky's line of analysis. Essentially, the report card on The Revolt Against the Masses is that the situation described in these essays has changed somewhat in style but hardly at all in substance. The nuclear shield replaces the ABM treaty, and Afghanistan replaces Vietnam as centers of political gravity-but the same coalition of forces across party and economy still dominate the American political process. The justifiably famous essay on "The Two Presidencies" shows how persistent is the gap between the conflict over domestic priorities and the consensus on foreign policy-and why. This is, in short, a classic text that continues to merit careful study by all those interested in political life. Aaron Wildavsky was, until his death in 1993, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California in Berkeley. He was also director of its Survey Research Center. He served as director of the Russell-Sage Foundation, was a president of the American Political Science Association, and held a number of visiting professorships during his lifetime. Most recently, Transaction has posthumously published Wildavsky's complete essays and papers in five volumes. Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt distinguished university professor emeritus at Rutgers, The State University, and longtime friend and associate of Aaron Wildavsky.

Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason is a work that continues to have a steady and large scale impact on political and social theory fifty years since its first appearance. A study of how radical thought modifies its actions and ideologies in a time of unrealized and frustrated expectations, the focus is on Georges Sorel and the Europe of the fin de siècle, a time when socialist revolution was forcefully set aside by liberal reform. In a technique that presaged contemporary period, radical demands did not simply dissolve or disappear, they profoundly changed emphasis from the impersonal forces of history to highly personal forces of individual will. This edition includes a substantial brand new introduction by the author.

This book is first and foremost a detailed and meticulous study of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1930). No other up-to-date books explore this thinker and his great work. Most importantly, the author demonstrates the relevance and importance of Ortega y Gasset's thought and his The Revolt of the Masses for today's world, showing, for instance, how Ortega's categories like "mass man" and "decadence," have been vindicated by today's spiritual, moral and cultural decay. This aspect of the book will perhaps be of major interest to the reading public. What Ortega argues for in his brief history of philosophy is something that he has otherwise made explicit throughout his work, mainly his conviction that strictly speaking philosophy as an activity or manner of thinking that faces naked reality, holistically, ended long ago with the ancient Greeks. All subsequent philosophical endeavors have been merely a rehashing or an academic commentary on the pre-existing philosophical canon. This latter activity he saw as pertaining to the history of philosophy, but he did not regard it as philosophy. Philosophy, as a vital and life-forging way of life, he argued, had played out its originality, and thus had run its course, long ago. With a glossary of special terms as used by Ortega, and with references to Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Josef Pieper, and others, this work is a fundamental tool for any student of Ortega, of existentialism, and 20th-century European philosophy. * Pedro Blas Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barry University in Miami. His areas of specialization include Continental philosophy, specifically Phenomenology, Existentialism, and philosophical aspects of literature. His works include Fragments: Essays In Subjectivity, Individuality And Autonomy (Algora, 2005), and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega's Philosophy of Subjectivity (Paragon House, 2005). Gonzalez holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from DePaul University.

Analysis of the impeachment and portrayal of the partisan and ideologically polarized state of American politics at the turn of the century. Argues that the battle was not over Clinton but over control of the policy agenda. [back cover].

This book, first published in 1930 and reissued in 1961, examines the Western phenomenon of the rise of the ‘mass-man’. Analysing the state of society before the Second World War, acclaimed philosopher Ortega y Gasset lays bare the problems that faced the countries of Europe in a book that resonates today in the imposition of direct action over discussion.

Written by racist theorist Lothrop Stoddard, this book advocates eugenics as a response to Communism.