The war on drugs the campaigns against smoking cigarettes v-chips to control what children watch on TV censoring the Internet and Calvin Klein jeans adsbipartisan lectures about the dangers of teen sex constant warnings about food and fat all are examples of what David Wagner terms the New Temperance. The New Temperance contrasts the new obsession with personal behavior in America during the last two decades with the brief period of relative freedom in the 1960s and early 1970s and suggests strong consistencies with our past. In particular, the late twentieth century appears to have...

Now available in paperback, What's Love Got to Do with It? is an insightful debunking of the way charitable giving disguises American neglect of the public welfare. Award-winning Professor of Social Work and Sociology David Wagner points out that while the United States prides itself on being one of the most generous nations, it provides its citizens with the lowest public benefits of any Western society and has rates of poverty and inequality among the highest in the industrialized world. These two facts, Wagner argues, are not unrelated: independent philanthropy actually provides a cover...