Dismantling Solidarity

"""Over the past half century, Americans' retirement pensions have become more subject to market risks. Michael A. McCarthy offers an innovative and rigorously constructed explanation for this change, linking it to politicians' efforts to manage crises while the balance of class forces shifted. This book advances our knowledge of recent political history and offers a model of how to understand the interaction of legislative and class politics.""-Richard Lachmann, University at Albany, State University of New York, author of Capitalists in Spite of Themselves ""Liberalization and privatization have many faces and come in a wide variety of ways. Michael A. McCarthy shows how Social Security, originally a public, nonmarket institution, is gradually penetrated by market forces and turned market-compatible in a capitalist context. The book makes an important contribution to the political economy of the welfare state and its transformation under the impact of liberalization.""-Wolfgang Streeck, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, coeditor of The End of Diversity? ""When a fresh voice is open to surprise reports on original research about a subject of fundamental importance, intellectual and political illumination can follow, as it does in this challenging and compelling book. This is policy history of the first rank.""-Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University, author of Fear Itself ""In Dismantling Solidarity, Michael A. McCarthy argues that policymakers drove the gradual privatization of retirement security. They did so, however, within two key constraints, namely, the structure of capitalism itself and the balance of class forces. McCarthy walks us through three periods in the transformation of American pensions: the initial drive to privatization after World War II; the initial financialization of pensions with Taft-Hartley and ERISA; and finally, the enormous shift from defined benefit plans to defined contribution or 401K plans. McCarthy offers a highly sophisticated, historically sensitive alternative hypothesis that turns on the interaction of multiple sets of actors. More sociologists should do work like this.""-Cedric de Leon, Providence College, author of The Origins of Right to Work ""Michael A. McCarthy marshals original historical research to get deep into the institutional details of pension financing and to trace the shifting alignments made possible by those institutional arrangements. The resulting work is a valuable contribution to the literature on the development of the public/private welfare state that should be consulted by any serious student of American political economy.""-Greta R. Krippner, author of Capitalizing on Crisis ""In Dismantling Solidarity, Michael A. McCarthy develops a powerful framework to explain the rise and fall of solidaristic pensions in the United States since World War II. He breathes new life into old debates about employers, the state, and the development of social policies.""-Fred Block, coauthor of The Power of Market Fundamentalism"