Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action - Twentieth-Anniversary Edition (Eliot Janeway Lectures on Historical Economics)

"Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? In this classic work, Albert O. Hirschman offers a stimulating social, political, and economic analysis dealing with how and why frustrations of private concerns lead to public involvement and public participation that eventually lead back to those private concerns. Emerging from this study is a wide range of insights, from a critique of conventional consumption theory to a new understanding of collective action and of universal suffrage."--BOOK JACKET.

Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? In this classic work, Albert O. Hirschman offers a stimulating social, political, and economic analysis dealing with how and why frustrations of private concerns lead to public involvement and public participation that eventually lead back to those private concerns. Emerging from this study is a wide range of insights, from a critique of conventional consumption theory to a new understanding of collective action and of universal suffrage.

Front cover 1 Preface 8 Contents 10 Introduction: A Private-Public Cycle? 14 1. On Disappointment 20 2. Varieties of Consumer Disappointment 36 3. The General Hostility Toward New Wealth 57 4. From Private Concerns into the Public Arena--I 73 5. From Private Concerns into the Public Arena--II 88 6. The Frustrations of Participation in Public Life--I 103 7. The Frustrations of Participation in Public Life--II 114 8. Privatization 132 Conclusion 142 Index 146 Back cover 150 With chapters on private concerns and the public arena, consumer disappointment, hostility toward new wealth and the frustration of participation in public life, this text provides an overall view of private interest and public action