Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action
ISBN: 9781400828265
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Self-interest; Consumption (Economics); Political participation; Collective behavior;

Why does society oscillate between intense interest in public issues and almost total concentration on private goals? In this classic work, Albert O. Hirschman offers a stimulating social, political, and economic analysis dealing with how and why frustrations of private concerns lead to public involvement and public participation that eventually lead back to those private concerns. Emerging from this study is a wide range of insights, from a critique of conventional consumption theory to a new understanding of collective action and of universal suffrage.


Albert O. Hirschman is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of many books, including Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and The Strategy of Economic Development . Robert H. Frank is Godwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Cornell University. He is the author of Luxury Fever (Princeton).
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