Content uploaded by Michael Illuzzi
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Michael Illuzzi on Nov 30, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
factories) and the reintroduction of corporate capital, creating the upper‐
class enclaves that we know and see today (Georgetown, Greenwich Village,
and Beacon Hill). But much of the initial investment seems to come from
young professionals or artists/bohemians who can temporarily tolerate
substandard living conditions to live close to work and burgeoning centers of
culture until property values improve.
Advanced gentrification (1980 to the present) differs in scale and scope:
it is bigger (encompassing more than a few blocks), involves more actors
(including global finance and the local state), and is more driven by financial
and profit‐based motives than its predecessor. These distinctions create
more standardization of gentrification processes and outcomes across cities,
which I think is an advantage when accounting for the harms (and benefits)
of it to neighborhoods, particularly those most vulnerable to eviction and
displacement. This book contributes to the study of gentrification from a
research, policymaking, and activist perspective by providing the needed
historical context in which this process unfolds, while offering next steps on
how to address its geographical variance in different U.S. regions.
AKIRA DRAKE RODRIGUEZ
University of Pennsylvania
Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American
Nation‐State by Elisabeth S. Clemens. Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 2020. 392 pp. Paper, $35.00.
In an age when people are searching for an alternative to powerful populist
nationalist stories, Elisabeth S. Clemens in Civic Gifts gives us a novel place
to look for one in U.S. history. Rather than looking at U.S. state building as a
battle of rival ideologies or stories, she argues that we should look to the
processes and infrastructures that associations have built and see how these
efforts—especially during times of acute crisis—have forged “imagined
community in enacted relationships”(p. 232). In particular, she highlights
the role that mass fundraising plays. “[T]he process of fund‐raising…[b]y
mobilizing large numbers of volunteers who would engage their personal
and professional networks…constituted the nation as a moral and emotional
collectivity”(p. 232).
Clemens says that in the United States, voluntarism and, more specifi-
cally, the infrastructural power built by organized gift giving forged a novel
“path to state capacity that bypassed both the strict constraints of electoral
BOOK REVIEWS | 631
democracy and the dangerous powers of a centralized bureaucratic state”(p.
50). Using a rich set of archival sources, Clemens’s analysis illustrates the
central importance of associations in many of the most important moments
of crisis in U.S. history: the United States Sanitary Commission mobilizing
and supplying the Union Army during the Civil War, the Community Chests
operating through the First World War, and the Red Cross, philanthropic
foundations, and Block Aid that helped the United States deal with re-
cessions, natural disasters, and war mobilizations. Through the navigation of
these crises, organizations ushered in new innovations that built infra-
structural power and capacity.
While the recombination and models changed in every period, Clemens
focuses on the consistent power of the “logic of the gift,”in which the mass
mobilization of donating translates into people becoming invested in aiding
anonymous others and creating a bond tying these anonymous others
together. Paradoxically, Clemens argues, when the federal government and
organized benevolence fused their activities after World War II (e.g., gov-
ernment raised funds that flowed to the nonprofits providing services),
“these exchanges no longer effectively enact[ed] the model of civic benev-
olence that had been such a powerful force”(p. 255). Throughout the book,
Clemens consistently points out the dual edge of benevolence that “often
reinforced the influence of privilege and the operation of inequalities,”but
she also insists “that a government depended not only on popular consent
but popular contribution”and that “[t]o recover such a possibility in the
present”requires “innovative combination and recombination”(p. 275).
Civic Gifts highlights the role associations played in the construction of
national identity formation, yet the definitions of voluntarism, benevolence,
and gift giving used are narrowed in ways that obscure important parts of
the story. The emphasis on the “logic of the gift”in the construction of
identity and state building makes the largely white male wealthy business
owners at the head of the Community Chests, Charity Organization Soci-
eties, and philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation
the lead actors in the construction of U.S. national identity. Clemens’s choice
of focus comes at a cost of obscuring the role played by other communities
struggling for a more equitable infrastructural power. The voluntarism and
associations of the abolitionists, the suffragette movement, the Catholic
Worker movement, and the Black Freedom Struggle (and so many others)
undoubtedly left their mark on the construction of U.S. nation and state
building (often in opposition to the actors featured in this book), but they
are missing from Clemens’s story.
Despite these limitations, the book should be of great interest and value
to political sociologists, those interested in American political development,
632 | BOOK REVIEWS
political theorists, and anyone interested in voluntarism, benevolence,
associational life, and state building in the United States.
MICHAEL J. ILLUZZI
Lesley University
The Women of 2018: The Pink Wave in the US House
Elections…and Its Legacy in 2020 by Barbara Burrell.
Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 2001. 191 pp. Cloth, $85.00;
paper, $26.50.
The story of the 2018 midterm election is often told in pithy, but usually
trite, media headlines (e.g., the second “Year of the Woman”). Such head-
lines belie the fact that important questions about the significance of the
election’s historic number of women candidates remain largely unanswered.
The Women of 2018: The Pink Wave in the US House Elections…and Its
Legacy in 2020 describes this historic midterm election and its implications
for research on women and politics.
Barbara Burrell’s analysis contributes to an emerging and often para-
doxical portrait of women’s representation. Research on gender stereotypes,
candidate communication, and even fundraising increasingly identifies a
lack of gender differences between men and women candidates. Yet, women
remain stubbornly underrepresented in elected office. Relying primarily on
publicly available qualitative data, including media coverage and campaign
websites, Burrell examines whether these findings hold true in 2018. The
analysis identifies the cohort of women congressional candidates in 2018,
their motivations for running, their campaign messages, as well as their
eventual transition to serving in Congress. Among the notable candidates
Burrell follows are the “avengers”who ran as a response to the #MeToo
movement, the “persisters”who were motivated by the symbolic silencing of
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D‐MA) by Senator Mitch McConnell (R‐KY),
and the national security–focused “badasses.”
Often obscured in Burrell’s emphasis on analyzing women’s campaigns
through their public comments and messages is how the broader political
environment of 2018 (and in one later chapter, 2020) affected their cam-
paign decisions. This tension is especially apparent in the analysis of cam-
paign messages. Burrell identifies women candidates’emphasis on health
care access, #MeToo and issues of sexual harassment and assault, and their
roles as mothers as a challenge to the “gender vulnerability”thesis and a shift
in their ability to run “as women.”Of course, these messages may also be a
BOOK REVIEWS | 633