Main Page

Courses

Biographical Background

Publications:

   Full
   Bibliography

   Social and
   Political Theory

   Health Care

   Communications    and Information

   Privatization

   Politics and
   Social Criticism
   (including    foreign policy)

Paul Starr

Work in Social and Political Theory

General theory

  • Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours, edited with Julian Zelizer (Columbia University Press, 2021). Read the "Introduction" and "Daniel Bell's Three-Dimensional Puzzle."
  • Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (Yale University Press, 2019). Read the Introduction (5 minutes).
      Ch. 1. "Understanding Entrenchment."
    • "Escaping Policy Traps: Strategic Options in Overcoming Entrenchment," Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Forthcoming, special issue on Entrenchment and Health Equity.

    The Public, the Media, and Democracy

  • "The Relational Public," Sociological Theory (forthcoming, June 2021).
  • "The Flooded Zone: How We Became More Vulnerable to Disinformation in the Digital Era," in W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, eds., The Age of Disinformation (Cambridge University Press [Social Science Research Council], 2020).
  • "Democratic Theory and the History of Communications," in Barbie Zelizer, ed., Explorations in Communications and History (Routledge, 2008), 34-44.
  • "Public Versus Private" from Chapter 3 of Freedom's Power, 53-58.
  • "The Opening of the Public Sphere: Early-Modern Origins," Chapter 1 of The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (Basic Books, 2004).

    Politics and political economy

  • "'Post-industrial' Versus 'Neoliberal': Rival Definitions of Our Age," in Paul Starr and Julian Zelizer, eds. Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours (New York: Columbia University Press, December 2021).
  • Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (Yale University Press, 2019). Excerpts: Introduction and "Ch. 3. Racial Slavery as an Entrenched Contradiction."
  • "Politics in the Orbit of Money" The New Republic (September 13, 2012; online August 24, 2012), 28-31. [PDF].
  • "The New Life of the Liberal State: Privatization and the Restructuring of State-Society Relations" in John Waterbury and Ezra Suleiman, eds., Public Enterprise and Privatization (Westview, 1990), 22-54.
  • "The Meaning of Privatization," Yale Law and Policy Review 6 (1988): 6-41. Reprinted in Alfred Kahn and Sheila Kamerman, eds., Privatization and the Welfare State (Princeton University Press, 1989).
  • "Passive Intervention," Working Papers for a New Society, July/August, 1979, with Gosta Esping-Andersen.

    Liberalism

  • Center-left Liberalism," Oxford Companion to American Politics (2012). A concise statement of liberalism as public philosophy, public policy, and politics.
  • "Dodging a Bullet: Democracy's Gains in Modern War," in Elizabeth Kier and Ronald R. Krebs, eds., In War's Wake: International Conflict and the Fate of Liberal Democracy(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50-66.
  • "Liberalism and the Discipline of Power," Chapter 1 of Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism (Basic Books, April 2007). For further discussion, see the entries under "Theory" at the book's web site.

    Sociology of Knowledge and the Professions

  • "The Post-Industrial Limits of Professionalization," in Gil Eyal and Tom Medvetz,eds., Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics, forthcoming.
  • "Social Categories and Claims in the Liberal State," Social Research 59 (Summer 1992): 263-95; different version published in Mary Douglas and David Hull, eds., How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman Among the Social Sciences (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 154-79.
  • "The Sociology of Official Statistics," in Alonso and Starr, eds., The Politics of Numbers, 7-57.

    Critical Assessments

  • "Daniel Bell's Three-Dimensional Puzzle," in Paul Starr and Julian Zelizer, eds., Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours (New York: Columbia University Press, December 2021).
  • "Is the Past in Our Future?" [Review of Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century] Contemporary Sociology (November 2014).
  • "Liberalism for Now" New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009. Review of Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?.
  • "Welcome to the Party," The New Republic, Nov. 19, 2008, 39-42. Review of Nancy Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.
  • "The Public Vanishes," The New Republic (August 14, 2000), 35-37. Review of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.
    Last modified, May 22, 2022 
    starr@princeton.edu
    		•