This book takes a comparative look at China's labor pains and the reforms taking shape in their wake. Some recent developments in China - rising strike levels, a surge of union organizing, and a raft of reforms - seem to echo the American New Deal experience. But even as China's leaders hope to replicate the prosperity and stability that flowed from the New Deal labor reforms, they are irrevocably opposed to the independent trade unions that were the central actors in both spurring and carrying out those reforms. In China the specter of an independent labor movement both drives and constrains every facet of China's labor policy, both its reforms and its use of repression. If China's workers get their New Deal, it will be a New Deal with "Chinese characteristics," very unlike what workers in the West achieved in the mid-20th century.

Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, “a towering figure in the study of American and European history” (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. This original study brings to vivid life the politicians and pundits of the time, including Walter Lippmann, who argued that America needed a dose of dictatorship; Mississippi’s five-foot-two Senator Theodore Bilbo, who advocated the legal separation of races; and Robert Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb yet was tragically undone by the nation’s hysteria. Fear Itself is a necessary work, vital to understanding our world—a world the New Deal first made.

"Disciplining the Poor" lays out the underlying logic of contemporary poverty governance in the United States. The authors argue that poverty governance - how social welfare policy choices get made, how authority gets exercised, and how collective pursuits get organized - has been transformed in the United States by two significant developments. The rise of paternalism has promoted a more directive and supervisory approach to managing the poor. This has intersected with a second development: the rise of neoliberalism as an organizing principle of governance. Neoliberals have redesigned state operations around market principles; to impose market discipline, core state functions - from war to welfare - have been contracted out to private providers. The authors seek to clarify the origins, operations, and consequences of neoliberal paternalism as a mode of poverty governance, tracing its impact from the federal level, to the state and county level, down to the differences in ways frontline case workers take disciplinary actions in individual cases. The book also addresses the complex role race has come to play in contemporary poverty governance.

The punitive turn taken by penal policies in advanced societies over the past two decades does not pertain to the traditional duo of crime and punishment. Rather, it heralds the establishment of a new government of social insecurity aimed at molding the conduct of the men and women caught in the turbulence of economic deregulation and the conversion of welfare into a springboard toward precarious employment. Within this 'liberal-paternalist' apparatus, the prison has recovered its original mission: to tame the populations and the territories rebellious to the emerging economic and moral order, and to ritually reassert the fortitude of the rulers. It is in the United States that this new politics and policy of marginality wedding restrictive 'workfare' and expansive 'prisonfare' was invented, in the wake of the social and racial reaction of the 1970s that was the crucible of the neoliberal revolution. "Punishing the Poor" takes the reader inside America's prison to probe the entrails of the bulimic carceral state that has risen on the ruins of the charitable state and the black ghetto. It demonstrates how, in the era of fragmented labor, the regulation of the lower classes no longer involves solely the maternal arm of the social-welfare state, but crucially implicates the stern and virile arm of the penal state. And it explains why the battle against crime is both a reaction to, and a diversion from, the new social question: namely, the generalization of insecure work and its impact on the life spaces and strategies of the urban proletariat. By uncovering the material underpinnings and unhinging the symbolic springs of the law-and-order reason that is now sweeping through the countries of the First and Second worlds, this bold book linking social and penal policies makes an original contribution to the historical anthropology of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.

With welfare reform a burning political issue, this special anniversary edition of the classic history of welfare in America has been revised and updated to include the latest bipartisan debates on how to “end welfare as we know it.”In the Shadow of the Poorhouse examines the origins of social welfare, both public and private, from the days of the colonial poorhouse through the current tragedy of the homeless. The book explains why such a highly criticized system persists. Katz explores the relationship between welfare and municipal reform; the role of welfare capitalism, eugenics, and social insurance in the reorganization of the labor market; the critical connection between poverty and politics in the rise of the New Deal welfare state; and how the War on Poverty of the '60s became the war on welfare of the '80s.

For Michael B. Katz, the term "welfare state" describes the intricate web of government programs, employer-provided benefits, and semiprivate organizations intended to promote economic security and to guarantee the basic necessities of life for all citizens: food, shelter, medical care, protection in childhood, and support in old age. In this updated edition of his seminal work The Price of Citizenship, Katz traces the evolution of the welfare state from colonial relief programs through the war on poverty and into our own age, marked by the "end of welfare as we know it." Katz argues that in the last decades, three great forces-a ferocious war on dependence, which has singled out the most vulnerable; the devolution of authority within both government and the private sector; and the application of market models to social policy-have permeated all aspects of the social contract. The Price of Citizenship shows how these changes have propelled America toward a future of increased inequality and decreased security as individuals compete for success in an open market with ever fewer protections against misfortune, power, and greed. A new chapter, written for this edition, explains how these trends continue in the post-9/11 era and how the response to Hurricane Katrina exposed the weaknesses of America's social safety net. Offering grounds for modest optimism, the new chapter also points to countervailing trends that may modify and even partially reverse the effects of recent welfare history.