Kim Phillips-Fein Books in Order

These essays examine how American businesses have shaped public policy, elections and government institutions since World War II. Case studies of taxation, regulation, religion and local politics reveal a contested relationship whose outcomes were never inevitable.

This essay collection explores the influence of business on twentieth-century American politics at national and local levels. Studies of public investment, war, civil rights and corporate organizing challenge the assumption that business leaders have always opposed an active state.

Kim Phillips-Fein traces American arguments against equality across two and a half centuries. Through aristocratic, industrial, racial and technological visions of hierarchy, she examines the people who claimed that unequal power was natural, beneficial and necessary.

Kim Phillips-Fein recounts New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis and the conflict over cuts to services, wages and public employment. The struggle between bankers, politicians, unions and residents reveals how threatened bankruptcy reshaped both the city and American government.

Kim Phillips-Fein traces the businessmen who organized resistance to the New Deal and helped build modern American conservatism. Their alliances, funding and institutions connect a defense of corporate power with the ideological movement that eventually elevated Ronald Reagan.