| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Social Contracts under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century. Ed. by Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. xii, 431 pp. $47.50, ISBN 0-87154-997-2.)

For a full twenty-eight years, the golden age of the twentieth century brought unprecedented prosperity as well as social and political stability to the core countries of the capitalist West. Beginning in 1945, the world's most industrialized countries saw their welfare states expand rapidly, their workers enjoy well-paying and stable jobs, and inequality drop precipitously. New sets of expectations and power relations created seemingly stable social contracts. An amorphous, ill-defined, and divided "middle class" became more central to Western societies, and the "rise of the middle class" became a prominent ideological trope.

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