On Scandal

...intellectually worthwhile and entertaining. - Publishers Weekly The popular way of treating scandals in the media is partisan or prurient and sensationalist. Ari Adut's book On Scandal cuts in another direction. He is analytical and comparative, showing the conditions under which various kinds of scandals occur or do not occur. Adut's work will illuminate the reader in the advance of sociological understanding. It is both an intellectual pleasure and a pleasure to read. It opens contentious events to the sociological eye with great clarity. The book will make its readers scandal-sophisticates. - Randall Collins, Dorothy Swaine Professor in Sociology, University of Pennsylvania Ari Adut tells us better than any scholar before him how scandals work. His case studies of scandals in politics and in art, of sex and of money and of taste, from the U.S., the U.K., and France, all give weight to a study that is sociologically original, subtle, and illuminating. - Michael Schudson, Columbia School of Journalism, author of The Good Citizen Historians and journalists have long written about particular scandals but have rarely reflected about scandal in general. In this brilliant and very readable book, Ari Adut subjects scandal to a penetrating sociological gaze, revealing its repeated dynamics and its potent force as an agent of social and cultural change. This is sociology at its most illuminating. - William Sewell, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and History Emeritus, University of Chicago Scandal has arisen for centuries and has always involved publicizing and stigmatizing moral transgression. In a wide-ranging historical and contemporary analysis, Ari Adut shows, however, that the central offenses around which scandal arises change and vary both dramatically and systematically. Read Adut for shock value if you wish, but read him especially for a major contribution to the analysis of public moral sensibility. - Viviana A. Zelizer, Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology, Princeton University, author of The Purchase of Intimacy Historians of nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century France and the United States should be provoked, positively, by this thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of Oscar Wilde's time, French political corruption, Watergate, and Monica Lewinsky. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, RIR