America's Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth. by Alan WolfeReview by: David A. SmithSocial Forces, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Mar., 1983), pp. 970-971Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2578180 .

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970 / Social Forces Volume 61:3, March 1983

America's Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth. By Alan Wolfe. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. 293 pp. $16.50.

Reviewver: DAVID A. SMITH, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In The Limits of Legitimacy (1977) Alan Wolfe set out to analyze "the tension between capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political one." The result was an impressive synthesis of theoretical and historical material in which the author argued that the contradiction between the competing ideologies of free-enterprise liberalism and participatory democracy is impelling the Western democracies to- ward a political crisis manifested in growing citizen apathy and rising state impo- tence.

America's Impasse is a much less ambitious work than The Limits of Legitimacy. Instead of trying to take on the advanced capitalist state in all its various guises, Wolfe focuses here on the specific case of the post-World War II United States. He is searching for the particular dynamic of recent American politics which has brought the nation to what he sees as the brink of political and economic disaster. The attention to political theory and the tight academic rigor of The Limits of Legitimacy are eschewed in favor of a looser, more journalistic, historical narrative. Yet the emphasis on political exhaustion and malaise-caused by the underlying tension between accumulation and legitimation-reveals the essential continuity between America's Impasse and the earlier book.

Wolfe begins by addressing the topical issue of the Republican victory in the 1980 elections. Unlike many analysts, he rejects the interpretation of Reaganism as a sharp break with the recent past, arguing that, if anything, the Reagan presidency represents a return to the dominant thrust of all post-war American politics-the supplanting of genuine political choice by a call for unbridled economic growth and military expansion. Wolfe claims that this supposed solution for the contemporary political and economic impasse is the very cause of the current crisis.

The roots of the present paralysis, Wolfe suggests, can be traced to the emergence of "growth politics" in the late 1940s. After the war the United States appeared to face a fundamental political choice between a return to traditional business-backed conservativism and the progressive liberalism of the New Deal. To avoid this politically unpalatable decision between the Right and the Left, politi- cians moved toward the center by proposing programs whose primary goal was economic growth. A broad-based "growth coalition" supported by business, or- ganized labor, and the military coalesced in support of the politics of economic expansion.

During the boom times of the 1950s and 1960s the ideologically eclectic pro- grams of the growth coalition failed in one policy area after another-from fighting poverty in American cities to providing aid to the Third World. Economic expansion was promoted, but the avowed humanitarian objectives of these initiatives were not met. While these policies may have been ineffective and unfair to the disadvan- taged in these earlier periods of sustained growth, Wolfe argues, they are simply impossible in the declining economy of the 1970s and 1980s. The irrelevance of growth politics is now rivaled by its exorbitant cost. This politically popular appeal to growth and expansion is no longer affordable; if followed, it will lead to economic ruin.

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Book Reviews / 971

Political sociologists familiar with Wolfe's earlier writing may be somewhat disappointed by this book. It includes very little theoretical development and no attempt to link the specific American situation to more general discussions of the capitalist state. In a quest for simplicity, Wolfe sometimes forces diverse events and phenomena into the same mold. For instance, in his treatment of the Third World, the "poorer countries" tend to be uncritically lumped together in one undifferen- tiated mass. The lack of attention to theoretical grounding also creates some major ambiguities. Most prominent is the nature of the relation between political stale- mate and economic crisis. At times Wolfe seems to suggest that "growth politics" is a major cause of the decline of U.S. hegemony in the world economy; at other points this demise is taken as a given. Certainly many factors have contributed to the economic weakening of the United States, and many of these are variables over which the American polity has had little or no control.

Despite these weaknesses, America's Impasse presents an important interpre- tation of contemporary American politics. Written in a style directed at a broad reading public, the book demonstrates the usefulness of sociological interpretation of our current national situation. Wolfe discusses political leaders like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter with considerable sympathy: he argues that they were, to a large extent, caught up in a structural trap not of their own making. An implica- tion of the analysis is that solutions to the problems of political exhaustion and economic stagnation require understanding their systemic nature and proposing policy alternatives that address structural causes. This is an important message for social scientists, the public, and policymakers.

The Growth Dilemma: Residents' Views and Local Population Change in the United States. By Mark Baldassare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. 175 pp. $20.00.

Reviewer: DANIEL J. MONTI, University of Missouri-St. Louis

Baldassare writes in the tradition of urban sociologists who think that changing the number of people living in an area will have social consequences for the residents. He purports to measure these "social" consequences by analyzing responses to survey items from NORC and ISR studies conducted during the 1970s. People answered questions about their sense of well-being or satisfaction with the services available in their area and opportunities for social intercourse. The results are dis- played according to the type of county the respondents lived in. Their answers should differ, Baldassare argues, according to whether they live in an area ex- periencing rapid growth or an area undergoing no growth, slow growth, or a de- cline in its population. We should want to know what these differences are in order to formulate more corrigible policies dealing with the structure and operation of local government.

If one accepts the premise that what people say about their lives has some bearing on how they behave toward one another, then we may be measuring some- thing pertaining to their social world. If one further accepts the premise that per- sons' attitudes toward that world are shaped by population changes in their county rather than those in a smaller, more familiar territory (like a census tract), then we

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