The Norristown Study PDF Download

Excerpt from The Norristown Study Professor Goldstein's excellent account of the Norristown project and its findings makes further description unnecessary. But, since he writes as a professional sociologist, there may be value in stating what interested an historian of general American culture in this community study, and which among the findings seem to this historian to be the more important. My initial interest was aroused by the possibility of taking some broad macrocosmic generalization regarding the nature of twentieth-century cultural change and testing it against local, concrete data. Among such generalizations one pair of conflicting propositions seemed of world-wide importance. Hundreds of millions of people outside the United States have been taught to believe that capitalism is increasingly failing to provide a satisfactory life for the mass of Americans, or stated in another form, that the ills of the twentieth century stem from the pressures of a declining capitalism. In contrast to this proposition two alternatives may be posed: (1) that many of the social maladjustments attributed to capitalism are the results of rapid technological change that is hard to assimilate in any society and (2) that life for the common man is in fact becoming more satisfactory. If these propositions were well supported in the history of a fairly representative American community over the last fifty years, social scientists in other nations would be presented with further evidence for the reevaluation of American capitalism which is being forced on objective thinkers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.