Dismantling Solidarity - by Michael A McCarthy (Paperback)

About the Book

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, Michael A. McCarthy argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth.

Book Synopsis

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, Michael A. McCarthy argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth.Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War II, private pension assets were then financialized and invested into the stock market, and, since the 1970s, traditional pension plans have come to be replaced with riskier 401(k) retirement plans. Comparing each episode of change, Dismantling Solidarity mounts a forceful challenge to common understandings of America's private pension system and offers an alternative political economy of the welfare state. McCarthy weaves together a theoretical framework that helps to explain pension marketization with structural mechanisms that push policymakers to intervene to promote capitalist growth and avoid capitalist crises and contingent historical factors that both drive them to intervene in the particular ways they do and shape how their interventions bear on welfare change. By emphasizing the capitalist context in which policymaking occurs, McCarthy turns our attention to the structural factors that drive policy change. Dismantling Solidarity is both theoretically and historically detailed and superbly argued, urging the reader to reconsider how capitalism itself constrains policymaking. It will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, historians, and those curious about the relationship between capitalism and democracy.

Review Quotes

As McCarthy rightly points out, the connection between developments of the welfare state and state management of economic crises has been drawn before. McCarthy's contribution, apart from skillfully tracing the history of the private pension system... is his explanation for and analysis of the contingency of retirement income. Dismantling Solidarity is an excellent account of the history of private pensions, but it is also a window into the future.

McCarthy navigates his theoretical terrain deftly and efficiently, taking the heavily dog-eared body of structuralist-Marxist state theory (Block, O'Connor, Offe, and Poulantzas) and makes it feel fresh.... Dismantling Solidarity joins a welcome influx of new scholarship that, in its framing and focus, calls attention to the fact that ours is a political moment that hungers for smart class analysis.

Offers not only an excellent and comprehensive overview but also a critical discussion of how the retirement security system has developed in the United States since World War II. With [McCarthy's] in-depth understanding of the U.S. welfare state, labor relations in general, and old-age security in particular, the author has written a coherent and informative book.... A great book that gives a masterful overview of howold-age security has developed in the United States, and it explains these developments with convincing arguments.Without any hesitation, I would recommend Dismantling Solidarity to a broad readership, including researchers and students in sociology, history, political science, and economics as well as stakeholders and policymakers.

About the Author

Michael A. McCarthy is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Marquette University.