Servants of Wealth: The Right's Assault on Economic Justice John Ehrenberg From the Preface: … We Americans live in the most unequal advanced country in the world. When compared with similar societies, ours has the greatest inequities in the distribution of income and wealth, the provision of basic health care, the relationship between CEO salaries and average wages, the influence of money on office-holders, and the level of political participation. This didn't happen overnight and is not the unforeseen product of economic growth. It's the direct result of twenty-five years of public policy that has favored wealth, rewarded property, and encouraged the concentration of both… … As the Right continues its long project of concentrating wealth in a small section of the population and developing a political apparatus openly dedicated to serving the needs of the rich, the United States is beginning to look more and more like the diseased state that the ancient Greeks called "plutocracy". How did this happen in a country whose history has been powerfully shaped by democratic movements and periods of social reform?... …This book doesn't pretend to offer a full account of how the Right was put together or how it came to dominate national life. It presents a broad survey of its important ideological currents, looks at several books that have contributed to its growth, establishes the attack on equality as its central project, and places social justice at the center of political democracy and individual freedom. If we're to understand twenty-five years of aggressive right-wing support for the unprecedented concentration of economic and political power, let's start at the beginning: with the ideas that helped make it work… John Ehrenberg is professor of political science at Long Island University. He is the author of Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea, Proudhon and His Age, and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: Marxism's Theory of Socialist Democracy.