The Government of Emergency
Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security
- 456 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
The Government of Emergency
Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security
About this book
The origins and development of the modern American emergency state
From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms: as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable systems upon which modern life depends.
The Government of Emergency tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and officials working in obscure government offices developed a new understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation's vulnerability, and organized a distinctive form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare for and manage potentially catastrophic events.
Through these conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts, officials, and policymakers to future emergencies.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface: A Vulnerable World
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The New Normalcy
- Part I. Crisis Government in the Great Depression and World War II
- Part II. Demobilization and Remobilization
- Part III. Cold War Planning for National Survival
- Epilogue: From Nuclear War to Climate Change
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index