Social Structure in the USA

Sociopathic Society: A People's Sociology of the United States 1st Edition

This book succeeds in exposing the failure of economics to recognize the impossibility of sustaining a market society at the expense of the welfare and well-being of society. What Derber makes clear, is that it is the carefully manufactured fiction of a self-regulating market itself, that is now facing a crisis of legitimacy, that can not be deferred by seeking justification with the rhetoric of economics. To the doctrine that there is no alternative (TINA) Derber replies, '"A newly intensified problem of "surplus people" is one of the great sociopathic crises of capitalism. The United States is no longer a manufacturing economy but it manufactures a huge surplus population of people. This includes not only the official unemployed and underemployed but millions of students, prisoners soldiers and retirees " This book goes on at length to propose that the alternative to facing this crisis and confronting the contradictions of capitalism, is a turn toward a more repressive corporately organized state or an even darker theocratic dominion. While his prognosis is chilling his analysis is the most wide ranging and intellectually satisfying among the many currently in print.