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• Stanje Polovno

DObro očuvano, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes, ROutledge, Guglielmo Carchedi

charts the reform movement from 1830 to 1940, and manages to pack in more than Fogelson's recent much longer Big-Cit Police (which covers similar ground). My one quarrel with it is his erection of an Aunt Sally of vulgar Marxism, to which he attributes the view that the police are automatically agents of 'dominant economic groups'. Against this, he points to the frequent unreliability of local police as strikebreakers in the nineteenth century, and the consequent resort of capitalists to private agencies like Pinkerton's. But as his own account shows, this 'problem' was one of the motives for the development of State police forces and the 'professionalizationS movement, intended to sever policemenss local loyalties. Levi's account of the growth of police militancy, based largely on case-studies of New York, Detroit and Atlanta, follows similar books by Juris and Feuille, RuchelmanS FIalpern and others. It is, however, by far the best work on the subject, not only for its wealth of detail? but also for the sophistication of its theoretical framework, drawing largely on O'Connor's analysis of the fiscal crisis of the State and Piven, Gurr, Hobsbawm and the Tillys on the development of protest movements. It avoids the managerial bias of most earlier works and sees the growth of police unionism as potentially an agent of radical change. However, it seems to underplay the reactionary character of police demands, demonstrated clearly in her own account of the often racist opposition by the Atlanta Fraternal Order of Police to Chief Herbert Jenkins' liberal reforms. Police unionization illustrate the contradictory class position of policemen as both salaried employees and upholders of the status quo. This presents analytic and political difficulties which Levi recognizes but does not fully explicate in her otherwise excellent study. Robert Reiner University of Bristol

tags društvene socijalne klase, klasno društvo, ekonomija, srednja klasa, prihodi, buržoazija, proleterijat, socio ekonomski sistem, kapitalizam, proizvodnja,