Rethinking Class Conflict in American Society

Writing at the Financial Times today, Daniel Ben-Ami reviews Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, now available from Telos Press. Save 30% when you order your copy in our online store.

Any serious attempt to understand the US’s current impasse by moving outside the conventional framework should be welcome. The stale pairings of liberal and conservative, right and left, no longer cut it.

Joel Kotkin, an American academic and author, has come up with the unlikely proposal of understanding the country’s predicament in terms of class conflict. But his conception is a world away from the old socialist notion of a combative proletariat battling against an intransigent ruling class. Instead, his is an innovative attempt to rethink the main contours of US society.

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Joel Kotkin on America’s New Class System

Writing in today’s USA Today, Glenn Harlan Reynolds (aka Instapundit) reviews Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict, just published by Telos Press. Order your copy in our online store.

We’ve heard a lot of election-year class warfare talk, from makers vs. takers to the 1% vs. the 99%. But Joel Kotkin’s important new book, The New Class Conflict, suggests that America’s real class problems are deeper, and more damaging, than election rhetoric.

Traditionally, America has been thought of as a place of great mobility—one where anyone can conceivably grow up to be president, regardless of background. This has never been entirely true, of course. Most of our presidents have come from reasonably well-off backgrounds, and even Barack Obama, a barrier-breaker in some ways, came from an affluent background and enjoyed an expensive private-school upbringing. But the problem Kotkin describes goes beyond shots at the White House. . . .

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Joel Kotkin on the Liberty Law Talk Podcast

On the Liberty Law Talk podcast today, Joel Kotkin talks with host Richard Reinsch about The New Class Conflict, now available from Telos Press. It’s a smart, wide-ranging interview that covers many of the central issues Kotkin raises in his new book: the way that today’s high-tech oligarchy, unlike the early twenty-century industrial magnates, have amassed both financial and cultural power; the exacerbation of wealth inequality in places like California as a result of government bureaucratization; the consolidation of the media by coastal urban elites and the consequent effect on cultural perceptions; the control over both U.S. political parties by the wealthy and the resulting distortion of the democratic process; and a whole lot more.

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Now Available: Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict

Telos Press Publishing is delighted to announce that Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict is now available. Purchase your copy today in our online store.

In ways not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, America is becoming a nation of increasingly sharply divided classes. Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict breaks down these new divisions for the first time, focusing on the ascendency of two classes: the tech Oligarchy, based in Silicon Valley; and the Clerisy, which includes much of the nation’s policy, media, and academic elites.

The New Class Conflict is written largely from the point of view of those who are, to date, the losers in this class conflict: the middle class. This group, which Kotkin calls the Yeomanry, has been the traditional bulwark of American society, politics, and economy. Yet under pressure from the ascendant Oligarchs and ever more powerful Clerisy, their prospects have diminished the American dream of class mobility that has animated its history and sustained its global appeal.

This book is both a call to arms and a unique piece of analysis about the possible evolution of our society into an increasingly quasi-feudal order. Looking beyond the conventional views of both left and right, conservative and liberal, Kotkin provides a tough but evenhanded analysis of our evolving class system, and suggests some approaches that might restore the middle class to its proper role as the dominant group in the American future.

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Joel Kotkin and the New American Feudalism

At the National Review Online, Fred Bauer explores the rise of neofeudalism in American society, and in doing so he draws explicitly on the writings of Joel Kotkin, whose forthcoming book The New Class Crisis will be published by Telos Press on September 1. Pre-order your copy of The New Class Crisis today, and we will ship it as soon as it becomes available.

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Now Available for Pre-Order: Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict

Telos Press Publishing is happy to announce that Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict is now available for pre-order. The book will be released on September 1, 2014.Pre-order your copy here, and we will ship it as soon as it becomes available.

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