| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inherited Wealth. By Jens Beckert, trans. Thomas Dunlap. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. x, 382 pp. Cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-0-691-12497-1. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-691-13451-2.)
Jens Beckert's Inherited Wealth is an English translation of a 2004 German study of the relationships between forms of legal and political debate during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and inheritance law in the United States, Germany, and France. The structure of the book was dictated by the desire to study the "development of law ... as an indicator of macrosocial processes of change" (p. 4). Following the lead of Emile Durkheim, Jürgen Habermas, and others, Beckert uses discourse as an entrée for exploring institutional action. The result is a book "focused largely on the legal and political debates on questions of inheritance law" (ibid.).	1
Some American historians and legal historians—especially those interested in narrative, family, and social history—may have limited interest in Inherited Wealth. Its utility to scholars of the American scene also may be limited by the study's lengthy comparative law content.	. . .

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