The Trouble with America: Why the System Is Breaking Down

Michel Crozier’s The Trouble with America offers a penetrating, Tocquevillian examination of the United States by one of France’s most influential sociologists. Drawing on his first encounters with America in the 1940s—when he discovered a nation of labor idealism, pragmatic management, and ambitious social science—Crozier contrasts the optimism of “happy days” with what he diagnoses in the 1980s as a pervasive legalism and cultural hesitation. The United States, he argues, once taught the ...