Benjamin Holtzman

American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Benjamin Holtzman is one of the Academy's 2018-2019 Visiting Scholars.

Ph.D. in History, Brown University, 2016
Crisis and Confidence: New York City and the Market Turn in the Late Twentieth Century
“Crisis and Confidence” uses the sweeping transformation of post-1960s New York to trace how market-oriented policies have come to proliferate across American life over the past five decades. The book examines imaginative and influential remedies diverse groups – especially those that were local, politically left and moderate, or outside of electoral politics altogether – advanced as a series of overlapping and reinforcing crises in New York disrupted long-standing logics about governance and economics. In the face of perceived crisis conditions, “Crisis and Confidence” argues, the difficult, sometimes desperate, everyday choices these citizens and policymakers faced produced both intentional and unanticipated shifts toward private sector and market solutions.