Why America Failed shows how, from its birth as a nation of "hustlers" to its collapse as an empire, the tools of the country's expansion proved to be the instruments of its demise. Why America Failed is the third and most engaging volume of Morris Berman's trilogy on the decline of the American empire. In The Twilight of American Culture, Berman examined the internal factors of that decline, showing that they were identical to those of Rome in its late-empire phase. In Dark Ages America, he explored the external factors—e.g., the fact that both empires were ultimately attacked from the outside—and the relationship between the events of 9/11 and the history of U.S. foreign policy. • In his most ambitious work to date, Berman looks at the "why" of it all • Probes America's commitment to economic liberalism and free enterprise stretching back to the late sixteenth century, and shows how this ideology, along with that of technological progress, rendered any alternative marginal to American history • Maintains, more than anything else, that this one-sided vision of the country's purpose finally did our nation in. Why America Failed is a controversial work, one that will shock, anger, and transform its readers. The book is a stimulating and provocative explanation of how we managed to wind up in our current situation: economically weak, politically passé, socially divided, and culturally adrift. It is a tour de force, a powerful conclusion to Berman's study of American imperial decline.

Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. Between 1982 and 1988 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Berman won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000 The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review. This was the first volume of a trilogy on the American empire, followed by Dark Ages America(2006) and Why America Failed (2011). Other published work includes Social Change and Scientific Organization (1978), A Question of Values (essays, 2010), Counting Blessings (poetry, 2011), Destiny (fiction, 2011), Spinning Straw Into Gold (memoir, 2013), and a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness: The Reenchantment of the World(1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000). During 2003-6 he was Visiting Professor in Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Visiting Professor in Humanities at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, during 2008-9. In 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Professor Berman lives in Mexico.