Overview

For over a hundred years, millions of Americans have joined together to fight a common enemy by campaigning against diseases. In Common Enemies, Rachel Kahn Best asks why disease campaigns have dominated a century of American philanthropy and health policy and how the fixation on diseases shapes efforts to improve lives. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses in an unprecedented history of disease politics, Best shows that to achieve consensus, disease campaigns tend to neglect stigmatized diseases and avoid controversial goals. But despite their limitations, disease campaigns do not crowd out efforts to solve other problems. Instead, they teach Americans to give and volunteer and build up public health infrastructure, bringing us together to solve problems and improve our lives.

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9780190918408

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In this meticulously researched and authoritative book, Rachel Kahn Best provides both a bird's eye view and an on-the-ground look at the politics and culture of disease advocacy in the United States. Common Enemies illuminates the historical roots of campaigns against disease, the remarkable persistence of this form of social movement, and its contemporary paradoxes. This book is 'must read' sociology. -Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University In the first truly comprehensive study of disease campaigns, Rachel Kahn Best explodes the idea that there's anything obvious about the form of health politics that seems to define the United States. Clear, cogent, thoroughly researched, and hugely informative, Common Enemies takes a big-picture approach that resists simple answers. -Steven Epstein, author of Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge and Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research Disease campaigns are so prevalent that, perhaps surprisingly, we often forget what an incredibly powerful force they can be in American society and politics. Offering a compelling perspective on how advocacy politics are rarely simple zero-sum games, Common Enemies represents a landmark contribution, rich with groundbreaking insights about social movements, organizations, medical research, and health politics and policy. -Edward Walker, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Information

Rachel Kahn Best is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She studies political responses to social problems, focusing on how advocacy and culture shape whose concerns are addressed and whose are ignored.

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