scholarly journals Horatio Alger Meets the Mobility Tables

10.3386/w7619 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Holtz-Eakin ◽  
Harvey Rosen ◽  
Robert Weathers
Keyword(s):  
Horatio Alger ◽  
Mobility Tables

The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale.

1970 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 935
Author(s):  
Harvey E. Goldberg ◽  
Richard Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Horatio Alger

The Boudoir Tales of Horatio Alger, Jr.

1976 ◽  
Vol X (1) ◽  
pp. 215-226
Author(s):  
Gary F. Scharnhorst
Keyword(s):  
Horatio Alger

Ransacking Mobility Tables

1980 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Huber ◽  
David L. Featherman ◽  
Robert M. Hauser
Keyword(s):  
Mobility Tables

Stockholm Noir: Neoliberalism and Gangsterism in Easy Money

2015 ◽  
pp. 104-118
Author(s):  
Michael Tapper
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Social Success ◽  
German Sociologist ◽  
Horatio Alger ◽  
Common Lands ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

The gangster story is a warped Horatio Alger tale. Carl Freedman notes that it connects to the mystery of the origins of capitalism in what Karl Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’, the consciously repressed history about how common lands and natural resources were privatised and how companies, backed up by national armed forces, plundered non-European continents of their riches. The greedy and ruthless gangster’s rise to social success is but a small-scale reflection of the genocides and the violent redistribution of wealth that gave birth to modern-day capitalism. Gangsterism is also the ultimate expression of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft. While his other key concept Gemeinschaft describes the ‘natural’ personal relations and values often found in rural communities, Gesellschaft stands for the ‘constructed’ impersonal relations through business and formal interaction that characterise life in the urban capitalist era. As national identity became a central issue in twentieth-century Europe – Fascism being the most extreme ideological project – gangsters and other social, legal and moral transgressors were often defined in popular culture as an alien intrusion of an otherwise idyllic Gemeinschaft.

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