Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?
The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate
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- 18,99 €
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- 18,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the “Cloward/Piven Strategy,” a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a “culture of poverty” and fomenting “violent revolution” to causing global warming and the recent financial crisis. Called an “enemy of the people,” over the past year Piven has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign of hatred and disinformation, spearheaded by Beck.
How is it that a distinguished university professor, past president of the American Sociological Association, and recipient of numerous awards and accolades for her work on behalf of the poor and for American voting rights, has attracted so much negative attention? For anyone who is skeptical of the World According to Beck, here is a guide to the ideas that Glenn fears most.
Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? is a concise, accessible introduction to Piven's actual thinking (versus Beck's outrageous claims), from her early work on welfare rights and “poor people's movements,” written with her late husband Richard Cloward, through her influential examination of American voting habits, and her most recent work on the possibilities for a new movement for progressive reform. A major corrective to right-wing bombast, this essential book is also a rich source of ideas and inspiration for anyone interested in progressive change.
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Piven, the noted political scientist who along with her late husband, Richard Cloward, has long studied and advocated for political empowerment strategies for the American poor, offers a sampling of her academic articles prompted by the conservative radio host Glenn Beck's virulent attacks on her. Reaching as far back as the early 1960s and concluding with a recent biographically detailed interview between the author and activist-philosopher Cornel West, Piven (Challenging Authority) eloquently dissects the structures of political influence. She concludes that "disruptive" actions by the poor (i.e., actions short of violence, such as rent strikes, that "break the rules" of the game) remain virtually the sole political means of addressing inequalities in a system from which they are largely excluded. Piven asks essential questions about and proposes solutions for the increasingly unequal distribution of political power (tied of course to the increasingly narrow concentration of economic power). After debt-ceiling deals and austerity cuts in the U.S., and riots in poor communities across England, these insightful, well-argued essays prove historically informative and remarkably timely, a true find for the general reader looking to make sense of political power in an imperfect democracy.
