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In the latter half of the twentieth century, The American upper class has become less like an aristocracy governing and guiding the nation and more like a caste, a privileged and closed body whose contribution to national leadership has steadily declined. This loss of power and authority has been the focus of the work of E. Digby Baltzell, whose 1964 work, The Protestant Establishment, analyzed the fate and function of a predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant upper class in an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous democracy. After 27 years, Baltzell's theory of the structure and function of the establishment remains unique in the literature of class stratification and authority. Baltzel...
Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been provided by self-made men, often, like Franklin, born outsi...
This classic account of the traditional upper class in America traces its origins, lifestyles, and political and social attitudes from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to that of John F. Kennedy. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell describes the problems of exclusion and prejudice within the community of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or WASPs, an acronym he coined) and predicts with amazing accuracy what will happen when this inbred group is forced to share privilege and power with talented members of minority groups. "The book may actually hold more interest today than when it was first published. New generations of readers can resonate all the more to this masterly and beautifully written work th...
Inspired by E. Digby Baltzell's extensive contributions to the field, this collection of essays addresses changing definitions of class, education for leadership, local tyrannies, the extent to which elites have risen into leadership positions, conditions of upper class maintenance, the contributions of the nation's cities to its democratic culture, the shape of democratic leadership, the role of political parties in fulfilling principles of equality and achievement, and the social (not merely political) meaning of democracy.
Although primarily a Proper Philadelphia story that starts with the city's Golden Age at the close of the eighteenth century, this classic study of an American business aristocracy of colonial stock and Protestant (largely Episcopalian) affiliations is also an analysis of how fabulously wealthy, nineteenth-century family founders in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia supported a series of class-creating institutions outside the family. These institutions included: the New England boarding schools; Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; and urban men's clubs and suburban country clubs. They produced, in the course of the twentieth century, a national, intercity, upper-class way of life. Philadelphia G...
Originally published: New York: Free Press, 1995.
Combining a thorough introduction to the work of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Italian social theorist Vilfredo Pareto with a highly readable English translation of Pareto's last monograph "Generalizations," originally published in 1920, this work illustrates how and why democratic forms of government undergo decay and are eventually reinvigorated. More than any other social scientist of his generation, Pareto offers a well-developed, articulate, and compelling theory of change based on a Newtonian vision of science and an engineering model of social equilibrium. This dynamic involves a shifting balance among the countervailing forces of centralization and decentralization of power,...
Judgment and Sensibility is the second volume of the collected essays of E. Digby Baltzell, one of the keenest observers and analysts of America's upper classes since Thorstein Veblen. Spanning four decades of writing, these essays cover a wide range of topics, including contemporary politics, democratic elitism, Puritanism, Judaism, higher education, urbanization, and the U.S. Supreme Court, among others.