This text provides a comprehensive description of the American political system, including major political institutions, processes, and policies. Unlike other introductory American politics textbooks, it develops a critical analysis of how American democracy is limited by fundamental inequalities in power and economic resources. The book highlights the connections between American politics and the organization of the economy. This fourth edition retains the author's critical perspective, describing American politics during the Clinton presidency and policy changes initiated in the Bush presidency.

The Politics of Power: A Critical Introduction to American Government

Education & Teaching

Katznelson, Ira

Kesselman, Mark

Draper, Alan

Schools & Teaching

Wadsworth Publishing

History

Americas

Harcourt College Pub.

This text provides a comprehensive description of the American political system, including major political institutions, processes, and policies. Unlike other introductory American politics textbooks, it develops a critical analysis of how American democracy is limited by fundamental inequalities in power and economic resources. The book highlights the connections between American politics and the organization of the economy. This fourth edition retains the author's critical perspective, describing American politics during the Clinton presidency and policy changes initiated in the Bush presidency.

The politics of power: A critical introduction to American government

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

This volume is a comparative study of democracy in India and the United States, using as its basis Alexis de Tocqueville's landmark study Democracy in America. It frames the comparison in terms of the distinct trajectories of the United States and India-the former as moving 'from equality' at birth towards new forms of inequality over time, and the latter moving 'towards equality' from an inegalitarian social order at independence. Examining the experience of democracy in two of the world's oldest and largest democracies, the essays discuss the effect of democratization on key elements of public life such as citizenship, religion, capitalism, the struggle for equality, and the status of minorities in both the countries.

Anxieties of Democracy Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States

Chatterjee, Partha

Legal Theory & Systems

Oxford University Press

In this work, Katznelson critically analyzes the development of Marxist scholarship on cities in the last quarter century. He demonstrates how some of the most important weaknesses in Marxism as a social theory can be remedied by forcing it to seriously engage with cities and spatial concerns, and explains the significant shortcomings even of this "improved" Marxism. Katznelson explores how a Marxism that is open to engagement with other social-theoretical traditions can help illuminate our understanding of cities and the patterns of class and group formation that have characterized urban life in the West.

Marxism and the City (Marxist Introductions)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Clarendon Press

Defeated in the East and discredited in the West, Marxism has broken down as an ideology as well as a guide to governance. For all its profound and infirming flaws as a total ensemble of understanding and rule, Marxism remains an important tool for comprehending and questioning key aspects of modernity. In this work, Katznelson critically analyzes the development of Marxist scholarship on cities in the last quarter century. He not only demonstrates how some of the most important weaknesses in Marxism as a social theory can be remedied by forcing it to seriously engage with cities and spatial concerns, but explains the significant shortcomings even of this "improved" Marxism. Katznelson explores how a Marxism that is open to engagement with other social-theoretical traditions can help illuminate our understanding of cities and the patterns of class and group formation that have characterized urban life in the West. Clearly written, this book will interest not only students and scholars of social and political theory, but those involved with sociology, geography and political science as well as anyone concerned with urban studies.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-30, and Britain, 1948-68

Social Sciences

University of Chicago Press

In City Trenches, Ira Katznelson looks at an important phenomenon of the sixties—the resurgence of community activism—and explains its sources, challenges, and failure. Katznelson argues that the American working class perceives workplace politics and community politics as separate and distinct spheres, a perception that defeats attempts to address grievances or raise demands that break the rules of local politics or of bread-and-butter unionism. He supports his thesis with an absorbing case study of Washington Heights-Inwood, a multiethnic working-class community in Manhattan.

City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States

During and especially after the Second World War, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war's devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate Western liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of western desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology and history that reverberate still. 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. In light of their epoch's calamities these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and holocaust. Confronting their period's dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. Decades later, in the midst of a new type of war and reanimated discussions of the concept of evil, we share no small stake in assessing their successes and limitations.

Desolation and Enlightenment (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)

Columbia University Press

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Books by Katznelson, Ira