The Last Half-Century: Societal Change and Politics in America (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)

The Last Half-Century represents the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship by Morris Janowitz.In this comprehensive and systematic analysis of the major trends in American society during the past fifty years, he probes the weakening of popular party affiliations and the increased inability of elected representatives to rule.Centering his work on the crucial concept of social control, Janowitz orders and assesses a vast amount of empirical research to clarify the failure of basic social institutions to resolve our chronic conflicts.For Janowitz, social control denotes a society's capacity to regulate itself within a moral framework that transcends simple self-interest.He poses urgent questions: Why has social control been so drastically weakened in our advanced industrial society? And what strategies can we use to strengthen it again?The expanation rests in part on the changes in social structure which make it more and more complicated for citizens to calculate their political self-i