Abstract
The American sociologist Charles Murray recently published Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010, a book that documents 50 years of changed college admission standards, government incentives, mating practices, and migration patterns that have wrought national divisions across indexes of marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Herein a relevant summary of Coming Apart is supplied, providing readers with a common and current understanding of the book’s pertinent content. As will be seen, Coming Apart’s thesis is that America is cleaving into separate populations across levels of marriage, industriousness, honesty, and other virtues putatively prerequisite for a functional republic.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, the neighborhood’s Wikipedia page was also accessed for edifying information, some of which is taken up by K. Milano in more detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishtown,_Philadelphia
- 2.
These specific statistics accessed at the following cite: http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Fishtown-Philadelphia-PA.html
- 3.
C. P. Snow, well positioned as a physical chemist turned novelist, gave a 1959 Senate House speech in Cambridge that was subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. As Coming Apart documents a great societal schism, The Two Cultures documented a great intellectual schism that had been taking place since the specialization of the sciences. As Snow’s thesis wends, there were no longer general intellectuals embodying Western wisdom, but scientists that knew but a bit of Dickens and humanists that could not define the second law of thermodynamics.
- 4.
Throughout, any page numbers cited refer to the hardback edition of the book.
References
Belmont Massachusetts. (2016, June 25). History & facts.
Milano, K. W. (2008). Remembering Kensington & Fishtown: Philadelphia’s Riverward neighborhoods. The History Press.
Milano, K. W. (2010). Hidden history of Kensington & Fishtown. The History Press.
Murray, C. (2012). Coming apart: The state of white America, 1960-2010. New York: Crown Forum.
Murray, C. A. (2015). By the people: Rebuilding liberty without permission. New York: Crown Forum.
Snow, C. P. (1993). The two cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press (Canto).
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Hertler, S.C. (2016). A Fault Line Fifty Years in the Making. In: Life History Evolution and Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48784-7_1
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