Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience

Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987

By Walter A. Jackson

468 pp., 6.125 x 9.25

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4460-1
    Published: February 1994
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-2060-2
    Published: July 2014
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6449-9
    Published: July 2014

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Awards & distinctions

1990 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Cultural Diversity, Cleveland Foundation

1991 Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America

Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) influenced the attitudes of a generation of Americans on the race issue and established Myrdal as a major critic of American politics and culture. Walter Jackson explores how the Swedish Social Democratic scholar, policymaker, and activist came to shape a consensus on one of America's most explosive public issues.

About the Author

Walter A. Jackson is assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University.
For more information about Walter A. Jackson, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A wide-sweeping, incisive, and penetrating biography of a great intellect and international figure."--Science

"In this magnificent piece of scholarship, Walter Jackson traces the convergence of Myrdal and the American Negro question as it stood in the mid-20th century. . . . An indispensable account of how one extraordinary social scientist traced the long-term origins of America's current dilemma."--Times Higher Education Supplement

"Jackson's work is an intellectual history far more than a biographical treatment; it captures the essential interaction of ideas, egos, and events. . . . Here is a treatment of how research and scholarship shaped and were shaped by the real world."--Journal of Southern History

"Indispensable reading for anybody who is curious about how a European economist with almost no background in American politics constructed the liberal paradigm of race relations . . . and laid the intellectual basis for government policies in the 1960s. The failure to implement Myrdal's vision remains America's dilemma."--Contemporary Sociology

"The deepest, most scholarly and insightful treatment yet written of Gunnar Myrdal and his classic, An American Dilemma. Walter Jackson's volume constitutes a major contribution to a variety of fields--race relations, the history and sociology of twentieth-century American social science, and the history of social policy in the United States. It can be highly recommended to all readers with interests in these fields."--Thomas F. Pettigrew, University of California, Santa Cruz