Shifting Involvements

Fülszöveg

Economics / Political Science ;
SHIFTING INVOLVEMENTS
Private Interest and Public Action
ALBERT 0. HIRSCHMAN _
Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? Albert O. Hirschman offers a cogent explanation of a cycle most recently manifested in the shifts from the quiet 1950s to the turbulent sixties and back to passivity in the seventies, but characteristic of Western society at least since the Industrial Revolution. The author seeks the mainspring of this cyclical movement in the diverse disappointments experienced by individuals and groups in their alternating quest for private or public happiness. Relating disappointment to specific experiences of consumers and citizens that account for changes in their preferences and behavior, this work probes both the highest enthusiasms and the deepest discontents of modern society.
Starting with the private sphere, the book examines the disappointment potential of... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Economics / Political Science ;
SHIFTING INVOLVEMENTS
Private Interest and Public Action
ALBERT 0. HIRSCHMAN _
Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? Albert O. Hirschman offers a cogent explanation of a cycle most recently manifested in the shifts from the quiet 1950s to the turbulent sixties and back to passivity in the seventies, but characteristic of Western society at least since the Industrial Revolution. The author seeks the mainspring of this cyclical movement in the diverse disappointments experienced by individuals and groups in their alternating quest for private or public happiness. Relating disappointment to specific experiences of consumers and citizens that account for changes in their preferences and behavior, this work probes both the highest enthusiasms and the deepest discontents of modern society.
Starting with the private sphere, the book examines the disappointment potential of different categories of consumer purchases. Then the author explains our periodic, heady involvements in public action, showing the eventual recoil from the public sphere to be motivated by the twin disappointments of overcommitment for the few and underinvolvement for the many. Emerging from this study is a wide range of insights, from a critique of conventional consumption theory to a new understanding of collective action and of universal suffrage.
Albert O. Hirschman is Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and numbers among his many works The Strategy of Economic Development (Yale), Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Harvard), and The Passions and the Interests (Princeton).
Ttie Eliot Janeway Lectures on Historical Economics in honor of Joseph Schumpeter, Princeton University (1979) Vissza