Reviews for Regulating a new society

The average rating for Regulating a new society based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-23 00:00:00 Raymond Meredith Morton Keller’s 1994 work Regulating a New Society is preoccupied with the social anxieties of a modernizing society and the tools it sought to use to create and enforce order. Keller examines the development of social policy at the state and federal level in the United States, with comparisons to other western nations, and is a part of Keller’s series on changes in United States policy from 1900-1933, following Affairs of State and Regulating a New Economy, with evidence drawn mainly from public policy and law journals, analyzing various policy questions and proposals. Keller chooses to ignore the political interests and aims which divided proposals by ideology, party and region, and instead seek the underlying commonalities. “However varied were the goals of social policymakers,” he tells us, “they had a shared sense that the good society was efficient, organized, cohesive . . . it is important to recognize how much overlap there was in social ideologies during the early 1900s.” Keller also draws together the pre- and post-World War I decades on the basis that many proposals first begun before the war came to fruition in the 1920s, while acknowledging that economic preoccupations shifted to issues of national identity during and after the war years. The portrait that emerges is of policy driven by interest groups rather than classes, and mainly preoccupied with an anxious search for order through the expansion of state regulation as a response to the rapid changes in American life wrought by industrialization and immigration. Keller takes a pessimistic view of these policy innovations, and has a keen eye for proposals that are in essence about control of groups deemed morally suspect, despite surrounding rhetoric about improving society. Despite the detailed analysis Keller presents on different policy topics, it becomes clear that choices he has made in terms of eliding the difference between left and right and pre and post-war have been in the service of creating a sinister portrait of social control. While his judgments often have some merit, Keller’s generalizations and methodological focus on the language and techniques in his evidence base of policy literature raise questions about the premises from which his analysis proceeds. Racial segregation, for instance, is placed within the context of other social regulations emerging across the policy spectrum because the ends it sought were couched in proposals of a similar scientific and technical language, because it had as its object social control, and because it was sometimes championed by proponents of other Progressive policies in the South. Yet often the issues at stake, such as segregated railroad cars, had been subjects of controversy for decades prior. This raises the question of the extent to which the spread of the scientific management principles animating the developing private economy had created a legitimizing and enabling rhetoric for regulation, a social prestige for regulation, or whether, as Keller has it, anxious adaptation to a new society drove regulation. Additionally, joining of the more left leaning pre-war decade and the conservative post war decade combined with a focus on regulation in itself creates a false picture in which progressive measures for labor regulation like child labor laws lose momentum and wither while conservative measures based on policing the labor of workers flourish. These changes say less about the inherent nature of the power of the state to regulate than the political back and forth between the interests of labor and management.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-01 00:00:00 Derek Wilson As a Canadian I found this book to be of particular interest. It was very fun to see the steps and the wars that America took to get to where they are now as a country. I think this is an excellent book to read to brush up on your American history and to read with your child. We can learn from our past, the good and the bad, but if we never have knowledge of the past then we can never can make a differences.