IN THE current Black Lives Matter crisis, this book offers key insights into the conditions of black and working-class families in the US.

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Maxine Eichner, Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, references the original premise of the American Dream to show how the fundamental expectation of the right to flourish has been decimated by government policies.

Beginning in the 1970s, the continual shifting of its responsibilities to the private domain has, Eichner contends, supplanted the social contract.

“Rising economic inequality and insecurity ... are making it increasingly difficult for family members to reconcile work and family, are destabilising marriages and cohabiting relationships among poor and working-class adults and are making it impossible for families at all income levels to secure for their children the circumstances they need to flourish,” Eichner writes.

The book contains shocking comparative data to show how the powder keg in the US has been building over the last half century. Inequality, education and healthcare cuts, job insecurity, flat-lined wages and unemployment — particularly for the African-American poor — form the background to a picture of exhausted and fragile families.

Eichner shows how free-market family policy is destabilising the US at its very core and, when the provisions of Tory austerity cuts are cited as superior examples of what a government could be offering its families, you really start to understand what’s going on now in the US.

Published by Oxford University Press, £19.99.