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Paul Starr
Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. At Princeton he holds the Stuart Chair in Communications and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School. He received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine and the 2005 Goldsmith Book Prize for The Creation of the Media. His new book, Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism, was published in April 2007. Professor Starr has written extensively on American society, politics, and both domestic and foreign policy. In 1990, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, he co-founded The American Prospect, a liberal magazine about politics, policy, and ideas. Published quarterly in its early years, the magazine now appears monthly in print as well as online. Visit WebsitePublications Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism (Basic Books, April 2007).
Liberalism in America is under siege. Conservatives treat it as an epithet and some progressives spurn it. But according to Paul Starr, liberalism is a sturdy public philosophy, deeply rooted in our traditions, capable of making America and the world more free and secure. This book tracks the development of liberalism as the world's dominant political tradition and argues for its continued ascendancy as the best guarantor of individual rights and prosperity on the global stage. At a time when conservative policies are weakening America’s long-term fiscal, economic, and international strength as well as its liberties, Freedom’s Power attempts to show why liberalism works—and how it can work for America again. 
The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (Basic Books, 2004).
Paul Starr chronicles the history of the media in America, contrasting the regulatory role of government with new issues of monopoly and threats to the guaranteed rights of free expression and individual privacy. At the same time, he demonstrates how complicated that role became when it had to confront motion pictures and broadcasting in the period when the nation experienced increased immigration, urbanization and other major cultural shifts. Counter forces in favor of moral regulation began to petition the government to use its power to restrain mass media, the institutional genesis for today’s culture wars. 
The Social Transformation of American Medicine (Basic Books, 1983).
How did the medical profession develop the authority it came to hold? This stud of the history of the profession from the end of the colonial period into the last quarter of the twentieth century focuses on how medicine gained power, technical expertise, and effective modes of diagnosis and treatment that, at the same time, appear to be moving doctors further away from patients. Starr invites the reader to consider the impact of modern stress on the profession and, more intently, on the constituency it is dedicated to serve. |
