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This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A searing, historically rich account of how US policing and punishment have been retrofitted over the last four decades to extract public and private revenues from America’s poorest and most vulnerable communities.

Alongside the rise of mass incarceration, a second profound and equally disturbing development has transpired. Since the 1980s, US policing and punishment have been remade into tools for stripping resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and turning them into public and private revenues. Legal Plunder analyzes this development’s origins, operations, consequences, and the political struggles that it has created.

Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, including original ethnographic research, Joshua Page and Joe Soss examine the predatory dimensions of criminal legal governance to show how practices that criminalize, police, and punish have been retrofitted to siphon resources from subordinated groups, subsidize governments, and generate corporate profits. As tax burdens have declined for the affluent, this financial extraction—now a core function of the country’s sprawling criminal legal apparatus—further compounds race, class, and gender inequalities and injustices. Legal Plunder shows that we can no longer afford to overlook legal plunder or the efforts to dismantle it.

A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous.

In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. As open societies struggle to match the economic productivity of authoritarian-capitalist economies, the promises of a meritocracy fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Living in the Future reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement.
 
Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical—in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States’ bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven’t yet been fully understood or appreciated.

Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A policy-focused approach to understanding the role of interest groups in US municipal governments.

Local politics in the United States once seemed tranquil compared to the divisiveness and dysfunction of the country’s national politics. Those days have passed. As multiple wide-ranging crises have thrust America’s local governments into the spotlight, they have also exposed policy failures and systemic problems that have mounted for years. While issues such as policing and the cost of housing are debated nationally, much of the policymaking surrounding these issues occurs locally. In Local Interests, Sarah F. Anzia explores how local governments—and the interest groups that try to influence them—create the policies that drive the national conversation: policing, economic development, housing, and challenges of taxing and spending. 

Anzia examines local interest groups in terms of the specific policies they pursue, including how these groups get active in politics and what impact they have. By offering new perspectives on these issues, Anzia contributes to our knowledge of how interest groups function and the significant role they play in shaping broader social outcomes.