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For the past six decades, Berkeley’s Sociology Department has consistently been ranked among the world’s top sociology departments. Our graduate program is ranked #1 in the latest U.S. News and World Report, and our undergrad degree is currently the best in the US according to College Factual and features on Grad Reports’ Best College List 2020.
Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…
Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s to 1990s
Economists and Societies is the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scholarly evidence, Marion Fourcade traces the history of economics in each country from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrating how each political, cultural, and institutional context gave ri...
Departmental Colloquium Series
Michael McCarthy Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal Monday
Monday, April 19, 2-3:30pm via Zoom
Michael McCarthy
Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal
What explains the decades long marketization of retirement security in the US since the New Deal period? This talk explores two key transformations, which both had profound demonstration effects around the world. First, the adoption of private collectively bargained pensions after World War Two as an alternative to expanding the public Social Security system. And second, the replacement of these defined-benefit plans with riskier defined-contribution plans, such as 401(k)s. It makes three interlocking arguments about these changes to develop a theory of structural contingency. First, state intervention in labor-management relations triggered marketization. Second, policymakers intervened to manage perceived crises in capitalism – a structural condition. And third, how they intervened and how their policy choices caused marketization was a result of historical contingencies. Drawing from archival research, the talk will argue that the structural constraints of capitalist democracy established a range of possible policy paths available to policymakers, but contingent factors channeled policy selection within that range. It argues that this has important implications for how we conceptualize capitalist democracy.
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Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University and an incoming Berggruen Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center on Science, Technology and Public Life. His book, Dismantling Solidarity, was awarded the American Sociological Association's Paul Sweezy Book Award and the Labor and Labor Movements' Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention. He currently has two book projects underway. The first is on democratizing finance and the second is on sociological Marxism.