Kookslams - Shop now
$18.50 with 34 percent savings
List Price: $28.00
$6.99 delivery Thursday, January 2. Details
Or fastest delivery December 24 - 26. Details
May arrive after Christmas. Need a gift sooner? Send an Amazon Gift Card instantly by email or text message.
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$18.50 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$18.50
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
FERNANDEZ Y OLIVERA
FERNANDEZ Y OLIVERA
Ships from
FERNANDEZ Y OLIVERA
Returns
Returnable until Jan 31, 2025
Returnable until Jan 31, 2025
For the 2024 holiday season, eligible items purchased between November 1 and December 31, 2024 can be returned until January 31, 2025.
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties Hardcover – January 21, 2020

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 917 ratings

Great on Kindle
Great Experience. Great Value.
iphone with kindle app
Putting our best book forward
Each Great on Kindle book offers a great reading experience, at a better value than print to keep your wallet happy.

Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.

View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.

Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.

Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.

Get the free Kindle app: Link to the kindle app page Link to the kindle app page
Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$18.50","priceAmount":18.50,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"18","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"50","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"kBUhznuf3rVEkLrIzq%2FOHb%2FIJOR7A2h7Ky7sR6yejaLdll3e0WEMhai3dXegsi304jeXIhxN5np9i98itkA1AQW6NmH4BOO5Y3kvwzzDoDjwcu3dQ53t%2F6dRl2VF5p0CNvNUEUlXvlMuktZBf0sPBz%2Fs9E0aWgx6bmIPoxkQspQuH9n0nsIk%2Bqs%2B%2FNd5ErgA","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House.

Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.

Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half century, taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through
Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycontin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules.

Essential, timely, hard to put down,
The Age of Entitlement is a brilliant and ambitious argument about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
The%20Amazon%20Book%20Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now

Frequently bought together

This item: The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
$18.50
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Ships from and sold by FERNANDEZ Y OLIVERA.
+
$10.68
Get it Jan 3 - 9
Only 5 left in stock - order soon.
Ships from and sold by Red's Corner.
+
$27.51
Get it as soon as Friday, Dec 27
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Total price: $00
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
spCSRF_Treatment
Some of these items ship sooner than the others.
Choose items to buy together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Wall Street Journal's Best Political Books of 2020

“One of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists”
New York Times Book Review

"
The Age of Entitlement is a work of history, not a work of sociological analysis. It does not conclude with a list of solutions or proposals. But this is no ordinary work of history. It engages and dazzles the reader in the way the histories of A.J.P. Taylor once did. Caldwell, as those who know his journalism and his 2010 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe will know, has a marvelous talent for pointing out the unacknowledged contradictions and perversities in the outlooks of both left and right."
Commentary

“American conservatism’s foremost writer… This is a heretical, unsettling work"
—The Irish Times

"
The Age of Entitlement is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight."
New York Magazine

“Scholarly, provocative, insightful: this is history-writing at its best. Readers of Caldwell’s journalism will instantly recognize his capacity to use a single moment or event to illuminate a much wider phenomenon. Anyone wishing to understand the failure of the American elite over the more than half century since President Kennedy was assassinated, and thus why Donald Trump was elected, must read but profoundly thoughtful book.”
— Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Leadership in War

“In this landmark cultural and political history of the last half-century, Christopher Caldwell brilliantly dissects the new progressive establishment, and shows how the reforms of the sixties gradually devolved into intolerance, self-righteousness, and the antithesis of what had started out as naive idealism. A singular analysis by a masterful chronicler of the sixties dreams that have gone so terribly, but predictably, wrong.”
— Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Case for Trump

The Age of Entitlement rudely dismembers the moral pretensions of our ruling class in the tradition of Christopher Lasch. If the trajectory of political correctness leaves you bewildered, here you will learn its institutional logic—the key role it plays in legitimating new structures of inequality. Thanks to Caldwell, we now understand how this regime change happened, and why half the electorate thought it necessary to cast a vote of desperation in 2016.”
—Matthew Crawford, New York Times bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft

“The sharpest and most insightful conservative critique of mainstream politics in years.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A deeper, wider cultural and constitutional narrative of the last half-century... Caldwell’s account is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding how resentments grew... nuanced and expansive”
— Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

"A sweeping but insightful examination into every social, political and legal decision, movement and trend that leaves us where we are today in a polarized nation. ... a fascinating read that could ignite 1,000 conversations ... Caldwell’s analysis of our Vietnam legacy is particularly masterful but the book brims with brisk evaluations of how a confident nation became an argumentative, fragmented one."
— The Associated Press

"In all, a deeply felt, highly readable, and dead honest account of America since the 1960s and the terrible wrong turn we took then and continue to follow, disrupting what we used to call the American way, and leading to the increasing alienation of many of our most productive citizens, who believe they may be losing their country."
The Washington Times

About the Author

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He was previously a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties and Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (January 21, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501106899
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501106897
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 917 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Christopher Caldwell
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He was previously a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties and Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
917 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers

Customers say

Customers find the book provides great insights and is relevant to them. They describe it as a well-researched, well-written, and accessible read with concise sentences and rich notes. However, some readers feel the pacing lacks conviction and the thesis is disturbing.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

28 customers mention "Insight"28 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful and relevant. They describe it as a well-researched, informative read that offers thought-provoking ideas and lessons for the future of freedom. Readers appreciate the comprehensive assessment of contemporary culture and political trends, as well as the book's focus on Great Society programs and their consequences.

"...This seems to me an extremely important book. The notes are very rich, referring to much related material of high relevance...." Read more

"...They can litigate. They can vote. They can win. A great book tells people not just why and how we got here, but what they can do to get there." Read more

"This is a combination social studies and history book of America since the Civil Rights Act of 1964...." Read more

"...Mr. Caldwell lays it all out -- in detail, but dispassionately...." Read more

24 customers mention "Readability"24 positive0 negative

Customers find the book well-written and insightful. They say it's worthwhile and worth reading. The hardcover quality is great.

"...After all, two can play the game. HOW TO MAKE THIS GOOD BOOK GREAT Average of 4 and 0 is 2...." Read more

"...The book is well written and well reasoned. It is hard to argue with. The only question imo is whether the U.S. is better or worse for it all." Read more

"...The author does a wonderful job of putting us back in the thick of things in the midst of our culture war that is still ongoing...." Read more

"...Still, very worthwhile, and many ideas expressed are sure to create a helpful context in which to view events in the days ahead." Read more

18 customers mention "Writing quality"14 positive4 negative

Customers find the book's writing clear and accessible. They appreciate the rich notes and references that support the author's arguments. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the changes in the US since the passage of the Constitution. It is well-researched and documented, making it suitable for advanced high school or college students.

"...The book is well researched and provides copious evidence for Caldwell's argument. There are 45 pages of references and notes...." Read more

"...This seems to me an extremely important book. The notes are very rich, referring to much related material of high relevance...." Read more

"The book is well written and reads quickly...." Read more

"...This would be a great book for advanced H.S. students or college to help explain the stunning transformation of the United States over the past half..." Read more

5 customers mention "Pacing"0 positive5 negative

Customers find the book's pacing slow and the thesis disturbing. They say the book fails to provide convincing arguments about civil rights laws. The notes and references are helpful, but the work is incomplete and unsatisfying.

"...It tries to draw parallels with the civil right laws but fails to do so convincingly...." Read more

"...He is REFERRED TO, but only in a dismissive, dehumanizing way. I'm not sure of Caldwell's politics, but I take it he's a "never-Trump" Republican...." Read more

"...But unsatisfyingly incomplete. Ends before Trump and in one brief observation says reversal requires repeal of the civil rights laws. Come on...." Read more

"...Very disturbing thesis. Seems to be well supported with notes and references." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2020
    Reading Christopher Caldwell's insightful analysis of the history of the United States since the 1960s is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. How the U.S. went from the greatest superpower of the 20th century to a socially, culturally, and politically disintegrating nation is made abundantly clear here. His central thesis is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a well-intentioned set of laws designed to right the wrongs of segregation and discrimination against Blacks in the South, has grown into the de facto Constitution of the United States, overriding and replacing the actual Constitution. This new Constitution operates outside the bounds of democracy, depending on litigation and an ever burgeoning civil rights bureaucracy to sustain it. Because of this, it doesn't matter which political party is in office, the revolution continues and the new Constitution is ever expanding in power and reach. As the author describes it, the twin pillars of Civil Rights are affirmative action and political correctness. Affirmative action, regardless of the intent, gives everyone in the country except the majority White population preferred status, in effect making Whites second class citizens. Political correctness is censorship, but the government does not have to enforce it. Instead it relies on the private sector, informed by a sympathetic media and the oligarchs of the tech industry, to punish dissidents. Political correctness is necessary because the Civil Rights industry is built on a single premise: that any and all failures of minority populations to be successful are due to White racism. Because it is built on this house of cards, any dissenting opinion must be suppressed. The author argues that because the U.S. is a diverse nation of many different races, ethnicities, and religions, the only thing that unites it is the original Constitution. Replacing it with a new Constitution based on identity politics and victimhood guarantees balkanization and perhaps eventual dissolution. The book is well researched and provides copious evidence for Caldwell's argument. There are 45 pages of references and notes. For those who think this is just a conservative hit piece, the author is actually harder on Republican presidents Reagan and George W. Bush than he is on Democrats Clinton and Obama. In particular, he excoriates Reagan for his disastrous amnesty bill. There is no mention of Trump except in the last paragraph of the book. The Age of Entitlement should be read by all Americans who care about the future of their country.
    18 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2020
    This is a narrative of American society from the 60s up to the present. Author Christopher Caldwell explains who gained power and wealth, who has lost, and how these changes led to the polarized politics of today. “The changes [in Federal law] from the 1960s,with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival Constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible--and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.”

    The starting point was Brown vs Board of Education. Rather than asking if schools could be separate but equal, the Supreme Court dismissed the question by stating that segregated schools were inherently unequal. The question then became one of freedom of association on equal terms. Blacks had to be granted the right to associate with whites. (The freedom of whites exclusively to associate with whites was ignored.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which applied to many public facilities besides schools, required the right to free association. A proportionate mix of white and black was required; if not, there was unequal association, therefore injustice. Public facilities of all kinds could always be found unequal in some way or other. Thus anxiety about inequality became a permanent condition, and was expanded to other groups besides blacks.

    The 60s marked a heightening and expansion of the American outlook from the cramped outlook of the 50’s. The heroes were the veterans, who were eventually to hold 75% of US Congressional seats. The 60s seemed idealistic and focused on increasing personal freedom. The culture was also heavily male. In cities, a lot of old but serviceable buildings were torn down and replaced by dreary brutalist structures (for example, Government Center in Boston). Freedom for women expanded after two major Supreme Court decisions, Griswold vs Connecticut and Roe vs Wade, even if nominally they were about privacy. Abortion became an issue on the political reliability of judges. The constitutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court was put in question. Then came the ERA, which was highly favored at the beginning of the 70’s but faded. ERA promised to feminize public space just as Civil Rights Act promised to desegregate it. Now, the author explains (not very clearly) there was a sense of too much freedom; therefore in the 70s a hankering for rural, off-freeway America.

    As we know reluctantly, the Vietnam war set America a large American goal that was disastrously lost. Originally Kennedy had planned to make an anti-communist state of Laos. American bureaucrats were sure they could build a Great Society in Southeast Asia. The war created a class division between the men who entered graduate or professional school and those who did not. Soldiers appeared as marauders and burners of villages. This had its impact on domestic politics. In Boston, school desegregregation through busing looked like a military campaign by well-off Bostonians against poor white neighborhoods. Privileged Americans took out of the Vietnam era an enhanced sense of moral authority. The people of South Boston were seen as part of the "basket of deplorables" and their future was to be overthrown.

    The author points out that the 70s were a period of disillusionment from the late 60s. Reaganism shared to some degree the counterculture’s deepest aspirations. It was for conservative localist freedom against progress, favoring voluntary communities like South Boston over bureaucratically designed housing projects. But Reagan merely tapped conservatism. The return of power to communities never happened. Jack Kemp and later, Clinton promoted low taxes (promoted by Kemp, Jude Wanniski, and Arthur Laffer), high expenditures on Social Security and Medicare, and a big helping hand for minorities. The US dollar became the world's reserve currency. The Baby Boomers used their generational voting power to vote all of this into effect, arrogating the better-paid labor of future generations (who then were not old enough to vote), and trading it to other nations whose low-wage population gave us inexpensive products.

    Social Security and Medicare were made more generous; there were expanded student loan programs and Pell grants. From an actuarial and human capital perspctive, the post-Reagan election years should have been easiest time to cut the budget, due to the large earning powr of Baby Boomers, but this didn’t happen. The wealth was spent on these expanding the new programs. As the author puts it, “The Great Society is the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened.” More and more classes were icluded in the victim class, including other races, women, immigrants, Native Americans, .. .on and on.

    The legally mandated outlays for civil rights, student loans and grants, grew incessantly, especially those for new programs, which courts assiduously worked to expand. The first major sign of this was the case of Nichols vs Lau (1974), concerning bilingual instruction in schools. The Supreme Court ruled that a school district was violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act if the children were not offered English instruction by their school district. By 1982 English instruction was offered in two forms, as a second language and as a bilingual program, but there were serious cost problems. The children were staying much longer in the bilingual program than appropriate. Similar cost-effectiveness problems occurred in other programs and in other cities. Boards of Education made many attempts to shut down bilingual programs, but they remained as a constitutional requirement.

    Reaganism was a generational truce that cut some deadwood from government but not much. The exorbitant policy of using the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and getting to write the rules of international commerce were outcomes that seemed uncertain when Reagan took office. Voters were unwilling to pay the taxes for Great Society programs, student loans, and Pell Grants. They were “too big to fail”. Their effectiveness was in dispute but an iron coalition of educ administrators and student advocates won’t let them be touched.

    "Diversity" was something of a cult-word in the late 80s. The author finds one source of its popularity in the Bakke decision, as an alternative for "equality". But another more mundane explanation is the widespread business use of the computer, which made it possible to assemble a product out of many different sources and designs; he cites Banana Republic clothing, in some ways "authentic," in other ways not. A manufactured product could draw on materials from all over the world (even if they were really cheap and new) and from designers in all different traditions (even if they were bogus). In human relations on the job, if there was a perceived lack of diversity in employment arrangements or a lack of sensitivity, there was a ground for a civil rights complaint. The author sees Political Correctness (PC) as "an unwillingness to distinguish between institutions (which could be oppressive) and individuals (which could only be misguided.) (p.156). Understandably he makes no attempt to explain how we can determine the restorative action necessary to remedy a specific complaint, but in general the required action had to meet a high bar. Undoing court-ordered diversity would be difficult if it could be done at all.

    The last chapter, "Losers", covers events in the last few years of this diversity/P.C. state, which the author sees as its culmination. Whites have been devalued to an inferior status, below "people of color": " ...when race rather than citizenship becomes the structure through which people accede to their rights, one must have a race, willy-nilly. And under the law, whites were "raceless". (p. 238). Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who successfully impersonated as black, was on her discovery attacked in the media for "passing" as black, as was Margaret Seltzer, a middle-class suburbanite who concocted a narrative about her life as a black female gang member. This was considered not funny, but a fraud. The publisher destroyed the entire print run of Seltzer's book. Then we have the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, who did not raise his hands and say "Don't shoot!" in his running attack on Officer Darren Wilson. In sum, whites were not allowed to joke about race in their own way or expect consistent standards concerning how people of color talked about them versus how they talked about people of color.

    These incidents reveal a class division: Dolezal, Seltzer, and Wilson on one side, media moguls and judges on the other. It’s as if, absent a provable crime, we are never allowed to see minorities as demanding more than is warranted. I can only wander how far this can go.

    This seems to me an extremely important book. The notes are very rich, referring to much related material of high relevance. There's a lot that for reasons of space alone, I've had to omit, even in this book of less than 300 pages, and only a few errors.
    53 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2024
    Scarcely will you read a book that opens your eyes and simultaneously makes you want to slam them shut. We are lost, and not only did we do it to ourselves but we broke the mechanisms by which societal mistakes have historically been fixed. We have permanently divided the nation into two camps that cannot be rejoined while piously claiming to be involved in a grand effort to make the nation undivided. And no one saw it coming although looking back, how inevitable it appears.
    6 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2021
    The book is well written and reads quickly. In short, the author ties all the social problems of today from PC language, cancel culture, big technology tyranny, and the demise of free speech due to the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I think his theory is correct, but he doesn't offer any solutions. The book ends with Ann Colter predicting Trump will run in 2016. This was true, but what do we do in 2021? Everything has just gotten worse and the ideals of 1964 have never been realized? So four stars for good problem definition, but I would like to see a revised version with some path to a solution, if one exists. If there is no solution, we had all better start learning to speak Chinese, because the USA can't go on as a divided nation led by a corrupt and ever expanding government.
    6 people found this helpful
    Report

Top reviews from other countries

  • Jean-Marc Cormier
    4.0 out of 5 stars Grab a copy before the book-burning mob cancels it.
    Reviewed in Canada on January 22, 2021
    Nothing that solid thinkers in the vein of the Founding Fathers and, later, the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell did not warn us about yet a very solid piece of work that anyone concerned with the progressive dismantling of the foundational values of free societies should read.

    Grab a copy before the cancel mob has it censored.
  • Dudleydogs Mum
    5.0 out of 5 stars the American dream
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 26, 2021
    we all know about the American Dream. Well now read about the American Nightmare.