Jean-Christian Vinel est historien, maître de conférences et membre du LARCA (UMR 8225). Ses recherches portent sur l’histoire du travail aux États-Unis, notamment le salariat qu’il a étudié dans une perspective socio-historique, et sur l’histoire des politiques sociales et de leur contestation.
In the historical narrative that prevails today, the New Deal years are positioned between two equally despised Gilded Ages—the first in the late nineteenth century and the second characterized by the world of Walmart, globalization, and right-wing populism in which we currently live. What defines these two ages is an increasing level of inequality legitimized by powerful ideologies, namely, Social Darwinism at the end of the nineteenth century and neoliberalism today. In stark contrast, the era of the New Deal was first and foremost an attempt to put an end to inequality in American society. In the historical longue durée, it appears today as a kind of golden age when policymakers and citizens sought to devise solutions to the two major « questions »—labor on one side, social on the other—that were at the heart of the American political economy during the twentieth century.
Capitalism Contested argues that the New Deal order remains an effective framework to make sense of the transformation of American political economy over the last hundred years. Contributors offer an historicized analysis of the degree to which that political, economic, and ideological order persists and the ways in which it has been transcended or even overthrown. The essays pay attention not only to those ideas and social forces hostile to the New Deal, but to the contradictions and debilities that were present at the inauguration or became inherent within this liberal impulse during the last half of the twentieth century. The unifying thematic among the essays consists not in their subject matter—politics, political economy, social thought, and legal scholarship are represented—but in a historical quest to assess the transformation and fate of an economic and policy order nearly a century after its creation.
- Titre : Capitalism Contested – The New Deal and Its Legacies
- Auteur : Jean-Christian Vinel, Romain Huret et Nelson Lichtenstein
- Éditeur : University of Pennsylvania Press
- Date de publication : avril 2021
- Nombre de pages : 360
- ISBN : 9780812252620