Double Standard by the American sociologist James W. Russell provides an historical and comparative overview on US social policy and European welfare state development, stressing American exceptionalism − in contrast to Europe's more social capitalism. It reads like an introductory textbook for students or an accessible social policy book for the politically interested. Russell's main aim is to show how unique the United States is among advanced economies and yet how much the US could nevertheless learn from European social standards. By introducing the reader to the fundamental political conceptions and main social policy areas, the book provides a helpful introduction for those not familiar with social policy thinking and development.

After only five years, the author felt the need to revise the first edition, so as to include the recent changes in US politics since the election of President Obama and the onset of the financial market crisis. Although publishers like frequent editions to sell more textbooks, here it seems reasonable to update the analysis given these contemporary developments, though the main historical and theoretical parts of the book remained unaltered. Laudably, the author has not merely added an afterword on the Great Recession to the new edition, he has also revised and extended several sections to include recent events, and he updated the comparative statistical tables.

For introductory reading, this book does include an unusually long part (the first six chapters following the introduction) on the historical and political ideological roots of today's welfare states. Spanning social political thinking from medieval times to Marx and Durkheim, the author provides brief histories of the main political and social science social thinking on how to deal with social problems and inequalities. Despite these universal intellectual currents, the modern development is deeply rooted in specific political orientations of Christian, laissez-faire, Liberal and Socialist leaning. American Conservative (anti-statist but market-liberal) doctrine is contrasted with Britain's Liberal, Scandinavia's Social Democratic and Continental Europe's Christian Democratic welfare state traditions. Although this resonates with Esping-Andersen's three regime worlds, no explicit discussion of the last two decades of ‘typology business’ in comparative welfare state research is undertaken.

In its empirical part, eight additional chapters focus on major social policy areas, including the main social risks of poverty, unemployment, care giving, old age and sickness. The United States sticks out as the country known to have the highest poverty rate. It is instructive to read how much even just measuring poverty has been a contentious political issue there, while the European Union has committed itself to the key aims of social inclusion and lowering poverty. Also old people in the United States face more poverty risks than in most of Europe due to the reliance on only basic social security and the importance of private pensions, the later coming under serious pressure in the wake of the financial market crisis. Although the chapter on unemployment is informative as to its premodern history and Roosevelt's New Deal policies, it lacks a discussion of postwar Keynesian demand-side policies as well as more recent neo-liberal supply-side policies and the general turn toward activation strategies.

American exceptionalism is most evident in sickness insurance, despite President Obama's 2010 health care reform that ‘marked progress towards but not achievement of universal health care coverage’ since it remains a ‘private-for-profit’ approach. Only Switzerland has a similar private system, as other European countries either have a social insurance or a national health system that is less expensive than the American. The empirical chapters also include more unusual additions to European social policy analysis: ‘ethnic and racial policy’ and ‘incarceration’, both topics of high political salience and academic debate in the United States. However, unfortunately, education policy is missing despite its centrality to the American equal opportunity credo and is also increasingly seen as preventive social policy in Europe.

Although the author stresses the transatlantic differences in types of capitalism, it is striking that the vast and influential social science literature on the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ is missing. Also markedly absent are recent additions to the welfare regime analysis by Esping-Andersen or the many subsequent comparative studies. Hence, the book is less usable as an advanced guide to the recent comparative political economy literature even if it introduces the undergraduate student or lay reader to the big picture of transatlantic social policy traditions.

The book does show convincingly that Americans must endure much higher rates of poverty, patchy health care coverage, significantly more crime, whereas Europeans by and large ‘wish to avoid increasing their social problems to the American level’. While the author acknowledges Weber's position that social science cannot scientifically determine value choices, he advances at the end some principles for progressive social policy, including social inclusion, integration and solidarity, and social equality, partially through maintaining decommodification of social benefits, increasing the social wage and upholding progressive taxation.

While American exceptionalism is the recurrent theme of the analysis, it is an interesting twist from his analyses of the past to his prospective policy recommendations that the author stresses that this should not preclude the adoption of European-like social policy solutions. For Russell, Europe provides a foil of better solutions to common social policy challenges. Although we learn a lot about fundamental differences between the United States and European welfare states, not much attention is given to intra-European differences, as individual European countries are only used rather ad hoc as contrasting cases. Widely discussed problems of the sustainability of the European social model and the ongoing restructuration, if not retrenchment in Europe, would have been important additions. For European readers, this rather undifferentiated and even glowing endorsement of Europe's social model is rather unsatisfying, while it may serve its purpose for American students: to indicate that alternative solutions to social policy challenges and the consequent provision of more welfare are possible, at least in Europe.