Politics and Authenticity

False Promises, by Stanley Aronowitz. New York: McGraw-Hill. 465 pp.

The Working Class Majority, by Andrew Levison. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. 319 pp.

In the wake of the fashionable “discovery” of working-class alienation and blue-collar blues in the late 1960s, academics and intellectuals have written a considerable amount of material on the worker. These two recent treatments of the American working class present conflicting versions,...