BLEG: The History Of The Idea Of Multiculturalism

by Tim Lacy

With this post I am seeking to build a strong sense of historiography on the idea, or intellectual history, of multiculturalism. It seems, based on my own explorations and surveying colleagues, that no authoritative text exists, either in article or book form. But I have no high confidence in this assertion.

Although several books on my shelf touch on the emergence of multiculturalism in the 1970s, I will likely build my thinking on Rodgers' accounting in---you guessed it---Age of Fracture.

What texts have you found most useful for discussing the historical development of the idea of multiculturalism?

As a starting point for thinking about the idea's history, here is some excerpted material from the Oxford English Dictionary:


Definition (only one offered, surprisingly): The characteristics of a multicultural society; (also) the policy or process whereby the distinctive identities of the cultural groups within such a society are maintained or supported.

First use recorded in OED: 1957   Hispania 40 349   The key to successful living here, as it is in Switzerland, is multilingualism, which can carry with it rich multiculturalism.

To add some subtlety, let's look at a few of the OED's entries for pluralism (using their number system):

 3. Polit. A theory or system of devolution and autonomy for organizations and individuals in preference to monolithic state power. Also: (advocacy of) a political system within which many parties or organizations have access to power.

First used: 1917   H. J. Laski Stud. Probl. Sovereignty i. 6   Pluralism, in the ultimate sense, is..impossible, for it would make unintelligible any rational interpretation of society.

4. The presence or tolerance of a diversity of ethnic or cultural groups within a society or state; (the advocacy of) toleration or acceptance of the coexistence of differing views, values, cultures, etc.

First used: 1924   H. Kallen Culture & Democracy in U.S. 43   Cultural growth is founded upon Cultural Pluralism. Cultural Pluralism is possible only in a democratic society whose institutions encourage individuality in groups, in persons, [and] in temperaments.

And a bonus entry from the usage list: 1995   N.Y. Rev. Bks. 19 Oct. 30/1   The institutions and practices of liberalism are likely to open public space to previously repressed and invisible groups, turning a merely theoretical or potential pluralism into an actual on-the-ground pluralism.

So the key difference here between multiculturalism and pluralism seems to be, for the former, active maintenance and support of difference of ethnic and/or cultural groups. But the latter is characterized by more passive tolerance and acceptance. The bonus entry, furthermore, tells us that liberalism is perhaps more often associated with pluralism than multiculturalism (think of the consummate liberal Arthur Schlesinger here, and Rodgers' citation (p. 210-211) of The Disuniting of America in relation to intellectual opposition to multiculturalism).

I'm looking forward to your input!

Congratulations to Daniel Rodgers

On behalf of all the writers and readers of the U.S. Intellectual History blog, as well as the members and friends of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, we wish to congratulate Daniel T. Rodgers, who was recently named as one of three winners of the 2012 Bancroft Prize. 

We knew that Age of Fracture was an Important Book.  Andrew Hartman made that call for the USIH blog on January 4, 2011.  He wrote, "A new book by Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture, which I predict will be the most talked about work of intellectual history since Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, implies that Marx’s thesis is a pretty good explanation for our postmodern condition."

Well...


What Daniel Rodgers's book implies became a subject of repeated inquiry and rigorous debate here on the blog and in the intellectual history blogosphere generally.  Andrew launched the discussion of Age of Fracture with a response to Lisa Szefel's review of Rodgers's book (History News Network), and followed his invocation of Szefel's critique with some reflections of his own ("The Culture Wars: Notes Towards a Working Definition").  Fellow blog authors Ben Alpers ("Pulling a Thread: How Should Intellectual Historians Deal with Erroneous, Foolish, or Vicious Thought?" ), Tim Lacy ("Who's In? The Hierarchy of Intellectuals"), Ray Haberski ("What Fractured?"),  David Sehat ("Intellectual History and the Age of Fracture, Part I") and Mike O'Connor ("more on 'Age of Fracture'") picked up the discussion and carried it forward, backward, and sideways, with the enthusiastic participation of commenters known and unknown.*

Indeed, in a marvelous bit of mimesis, Daniel Rodgers and his brilliant book spread across the USIH cosmos (on this blog and well beyond it) like the very contagion of metaphors he so brilliantly, thickly and deftly described.

A highlight of the fourth annual USIH conference (the first to be held under the auspices of the newly organized S-USIH) was an entire session devoted to discussing Rodgers's Age of Fracture.  Ben Alpers chaired the roundtable; Andrew Hartman,  James Livingston, Lisa Szefel, and Mary Dudziak offered careful, critical reviews of the work.  Daniel Rodgers responded thoughtfully to these thoughtful interlocutors, and answered questions from the audience -- though, as is only fitting for such a thought-provoking book, his cryptic, coy replies may have raised more questions than they answered.

Beyond question, though, is the breathtaking brilliance of Age of Fracture.  Daniel Rodgers managed to frame the epistemic frame of an age in such a way that others are able to glimpse its contours, even as we stand within it.  That is no small feat, and this is no small book.

We are all delighted that Daniel Rodgers has been honored for this remarkable work.


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*I have provided links to just a few of more than a score of posts on this blog labeled with the keywords "Age of Fracture" or "Daniel Rodgers." There are many more posts where Rodgers, his book, and his ideas are the subject of discussion in the text and the comments.

Andrew's Compulsory Reading

(I title today's post with tongue firmly in cheek, partly as a playful attempt to tease Tim about his "light reading" series, and partly because some of the "compulsory" reading is my own writing, the height of shameless self-promotion.)

1. Occupy Wall Street: A New Culture War?, by Andrew Hartman, Chronicle of Higher Education

My thinking in this article comes from my October 18 blog post. That post got thousands of hits thanks to a plug by Andrew Sullivan (who also linked to Ben's post the day before on the ubiquity of being labled a Straussian--the common ingredient: we were both critical of Matt Yglesias).

2. Our Age of Fracture Roundtable.

This link is to the excellent response by Dan Rodgers--which carries links to the entire roundtable, including reviews by me, Jim Livingston, Lisa Szefel, and Mary Dudziak. They all made it a wonderful roundtable, both in person at our conference, and in "print" here at the blog.

3. 2011 Cliopatria Nominations for best historical blogging.

Make your nominations. And enjoy reading some of the best in historical blogging.

4. "America's Superman," Adam Kirsch, Prospect Magazine.

This marks the second positive review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas--and her book has only been on shelves for a few weeks!

5. "The Mythologian," By Perry Anderson, New Left Review.

Unfortunately, this lovely review of Patrick Wilcken's new biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, which sounds like a marvelous book, is behind a pay wall. Boo. I'll paste the final paragraph of the review for flavor:

The final verdict of Wilcken’s delicate and moving book is impeccable. ‘In a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition’, but though ‘there was great breadth and scope to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas’, they were ultimately fitted into an ‘intellectually claustrophobic space’—a ‘one-man enterprise that became so utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible to build on.’ As a system, ‘structuralism implied depth, but with its interplay of referentless signs, often felt more like skidding along polished glass.’ Yet ‘what gave life to Lévi-Strauss’s output, and introduced the lyricism that baffled his Anglo-Saxon critics, was a profound interest in aesthetic expression and appreciation that ran in tandem with the cognitive side of his work.’ The anthropologist saw himself as an artist manqué. But Lévi-Strauss was not only a great collector and weaver of narratives—‘myths are very beautiful objects’, he remarked, ‘and one never tires of contemplating them, manipulating them’. The second verb tells its own story. He was also a great writer, in the art, no minor one, of rhetoric.

6. BOOK FORUM: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell, Hedgehog Review.

Unfortunately, the contents of this forum, with contributions by Wilfred McClay, David Courtwright, and Krishan Kumar, are not even available online. So if your institutional library carries Hedgehog, check out this neat little forum on a book crucial to 1970s social thought.

7. Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, by Andrew Zimmerman.

I am currently reading this book with my graduate students. It's fascinating--in both empirical and methodological terms. Zimmerman applies the cultural theory that informs so much micro-history to the macro-history of capitalism and imperialism.

Rodgers Responds (Part V of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: This response by Dan Rodgers is the fifth installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. For the third, see Lisa Szefel's review here. For the fourth, See Mary Dudziak's review here.
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It is a great pleasure to participate in this forum, and I am grateful to Andrew Hartman and Ben Alpers for organizing it and to Andrew, Lisa Szefel, Mary Dudziak, and Jim Livingston for their thoughtful and wide-ranging comments. Those comments have focused in part on Age of Fracture, but they have also focused on the period as a whole, on the books that others are completing (Jim’s new rereading of the late twentieth-century economy and Mary’s forthcoming book on the concept of “wartime”), and on books that they would like to see written, as Lisa urged in her HNN review and repeatedly so eloquently today. And that is as it should be. The subjects of our times are big and urgent, and there is no way that a single book can, or should presume to, encompass all of what needs to be done.

Because this forum has ranged so widely, however, it may be useful to start by saying what I intended in Age of Fracture. I wanted to think about social ideas and arguments in the last quarter of the twentieth century, but still more I wanted to map out some stories about change. I wanted to probe the ways in which certain assumptions fell out of use, new terms crowded in, and debates were reframed. This was an experience everyone felt who lived through this period, and I thought there might be something to be gained by looking at it more closely.

This is not the only way to write a period’s intellectual history. Many of our best models in intellectual history are, by design, static. They identify a period’s key thinkers and key books, they work their way into the period’s central debates, and they figure out a pattern, a wall mural of sorts, that will hold them all. This is important work, and we have all done some of it, if not in print then in our undergraduate teaching.

But I wanted to experiment with a different design: to take some key arenas of debate in which change was particularly striking and explore the ways in which, within those same arenas, the very terms, arguments, and assumptions cracked and shifted. As those who have read Age of Fracture know, I was particularly interested in those arenas where academic thought and public argument met. I wanted to probe the way economics changed its skin, how its disciplinary axis and textbook formulas shifted and how economic argument and policy shifted with them. I wanted to explore not only arguments about race and racism in American society but the ways in which the very terms for thinking about race and identity shifted. I was interested in the ways in which feminism, launched so confidently at the period’s beginning, was remade. I was interested in the ways in which notions of instantly traversable time moved into unexpected places. In the mid-twentieth-century moment in which Alexander Bickel’s jurisprudence was formed, as Mary Dudziak notes, time and history had a glacial presence. It was the point of law school and college education to demonstrate how slowly history moved and how sticky and massive its motions were.

That mid-twentieth-century moment in social thought and argument is the reference point for these and other stories of change braided through Age of Fracture: the years of the high Cold War, when recognition of the power of history, society, institutions, and social structures was at its height in the academies and in public life. By looking at the same fields of argument as their common sense shifted over the next quarter century, I thought we might learn something important both about ideas and about change.

Shaping the design of the project in this way meant leaving out a lot. Popular media, the cracking of the monopoly of network television, the extraordinarily rapid dissemination of the personal computer, the rise of new media icons, the collapse of mid-twentieth-century censorship: all this and more fell outside the core focus of the book. So did many other debates that I might have followed, not the least, as Lisa has reemphasized, the crisis, which was simultaneously a crisis in ideas, identities, politics, and society, over AIDS and its devastations. I wasn’t trying to map the whole terrain of argument and debate. The idea of a Zeitgeist went out, or should have, at the end of the nineteenth century. I was interested in probing some critically important parts of the intellectual terrain in which we now live. But there is a lot left do, and a lot that should be done.

These, then, were my intentions in writing Age of Fracture, and I’d like to think that in some ways I succeeded in realizing them. But no one should endeavor a serious project without anticipating serious critique. That, too, is as it should be. In the comments at this forum and in other venues, critical reactions to Age of Fracture have tended to cluster around three issues which, in shorthand, might be called machinery, metaphors, and mood. First, where is the causal motor to be found behind the shifts in ideas and argument that Age of Fracture describes? What drove and explains the pervasive fracturing of the vocabulary of social life into small, actor-centered pieces, imagined as choosing, preference-satisfying individuals? Second, in this quest for causal explanations, of what serious use, if at all, is a phrase like “a contagion of metaphors?” Last, what is the mood of Age of Fracture? Austere and bleak, as Michael O’Brien reads it, elegiac and funereal, as Jim Livingston has it, or ambivalent, as Andrew Hartman suggests? All of these are invitations to larger discussions about which there’s time here only to say a word.

In explaining why a larger, thicker sense of society became so much more difficult to grasp in the last quarter of the twentieth century there are two powerful arguments in the existing scholarship. The first points to the work of the conservative foundations and the efforts of their managers and business funders to alter the terms of social debate. The second points, more generally, to the new shape of the post-industrial, post-Fordist economy and the needs of the new regime of flexible accumulation for the provisional, socially disembedded selves and disembedded ideas that the era produced.

Both these explanations are terrifically important, and yet, in themselves, they both seem to me insufficient. Assuming relatively passive audiences for the books the conservative think tanks fostered and for the economic forces of the age, they leave out the enormous amount of intellectual work that pervaded the era: the arguing, debating, claiming, refuting, puzzling out, and creative intellectual imagining that also shaped these years. Without wrestling seriously with its intense intellectual labor, we miss a key part of the age.

Is it naive of me to think that we must hold simultaneously to the extraordinary importance of structures—social, economic, technical, and political--and to the extraordinary vitality of ideas, aspirations, nightmares, and theories: the stuff of the mind? I think not. For to pose it as an either-or choice—choose structures or choose culture, as Andrew Hartman proposes—seems to me a false demand. And that is not because I like some forms of structural reasoning for some purposes, and like culturalist explanations for others. Or because I like or don’t like their political outcomes. It is a false choice because there is no recognizable picture of the world that doesn’t have a strong place for both structures and ideas. To refuse a false choice isn’t to slip into ambiguity. It is a position of realism.

But once you take the demands of the late-capitalist economy out of the driver’s seat and once you recognize that money can’t, in itself, buy assent, how are we to understand the ways in which so many of these debates seemed to echo each others’ terms and assumptions? This was not the case at the outset. Economists struggling to find adequate models for the economic turmoil of the 1970s, feminists struggling to forge a politics in which the personal and the solidaristic would hold together, political theorists struggling to find explanations for power more adequate to their symbol-saturated age, and others moved initially within separate and sharply defined contours of argument and experience. Only in time did it become apparent that these efforts had taken many of them down uncannily parallel tracks.

Through a “contagion of metaphors,” I wrote, and in retrospect it is clear that I should have made it an argument not just a phrase. I won’t spell out that argument now, but it’s a realm of intellectual and cultural life that intellectual historians ought to take more seriously than we do. For nothing is more powerful in shaping ways of seeing than a claim of likeness. “War is a surgical operation.” “War is hell.” “War is a strategic game.” “War is a gigantic fog.” These are not simply phrases. They act as trump cards in academic as well as popular debate: analogies with powerful real-life consequences.

The play of opposing metaphors can lead toward standoffs; it may strew the field of argument with the radical incommensurabilities that make discussion impossible. But claims of likeness can also be generative, as ways of seeing and claiming move from one terrain to another. 1960s liberation movements were all about seeing one’s own situation and claims for justice as like that of others. To see the Berkeley campus as another version of racist Mississippi, to see the subjugation of women as just as deep as the oppressions committed in the name of whiteness, to see gays as standing in the same social space as a phalanx of other oppressed persons: the “movement” was built on likeness claims of this sort, and it fell into smaller pieces when the analogies could no longer sustain their weight.

In a parallel fashion, in what I have called an age of fracture, the metaphor which constructed the self as a choosing entity, as engaged in a kind of perpetual shopping and choice-making activity—raced through the academic disciplines and through politics alike, spilling across boundaries of academic discipline and social debate. It did so not as theory but as a claim of one context being “like” something else. This is the work of metaphor, and we should think about it more consciously and take it more seriously than we do.

Finally, a word about the mood of Age of Fracture. Some readers have found it mournful and nostalgic, though neither was my intent. I’m not as hopeful as Jim Livingston is in his new Against Thrift. I am not as convinced as he is that those aspects of social and economic change that he identifies as primitive disaccumulation are the only game in town. I am more worried by the forms of highly sophisticated accumulation going on at a terrific speed underneath us. But going back to the high Cold War era in social thought is not my aim.

Andrew Hartman worries that I take “a moral position neither for nor against our age,” but that, too, seems to me a false choice. What would it mean to be for an age, or against it? You live in the middle of the age you are in: arguing with it, shaped by it but hoping to shape it as well, inextricably part of it, struck by the beauty and courage you find in it, angry and distressed by its meanness and injustice. There is really no other place to stand than that.

I didn’t write Age of Fracture to pronounce a simple judgment on the last thirty years of American intellectual life. What I hoped to do, rather, was to take seriously the ways in which some Americans, placed where their ideas turned out to have very large consequences, talked and argued and thought their way from one set of assumptions about society and selves to another. I wanted to show that in the midst of that creative and productive ferment they let the language for some important dimensions of life fracture. I hoped that retracing those steps might help us find our way to something more adequate for our times, when our practical, collective interdependence strains against the choice-saturated language with which we try to grasp it.

Dan Rodgers

Dudziak on Rodgers (Part IV of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: Mary Dudziak's review of Age of Fracture is the fourth installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. For the third, see Lisa Szefel's review here. Expect Dan Rodgers's response in the next day or two.

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My Age of Fracture, and reflections on Time in the History of Constitutional Theory
Mary L. Dudziak, University of Southern California Law School

I. My Age of Fracture

In the halls of the Yale Law School in the fall of 1980, the spirit of Alexander Bickel – the great constitutional theorist who died in 1974 at the age of 49, still hung in the air. Forever caught in time, Bickel’s portrait of too young a man to occupy those picture frames, graced the walls of the school’s most important lecture hall. Bickel was not simply a revered former colleague. He had become a hegemon, so that the rest of his generation’s intellectual leaders thought and wrote in his wake – his legacy generating an understanding of the world so that others had to respond to his terms. [1] He had the sort of structuring impact on legal thought that Dan Rodgers so beautifully describes as the way that ideas have a structuring impact on history at the beginning of his book.

Bickel appears as minor figure in Age of Fracture, but was so important to legal thought that for one of the next great constitutional theorists, Bruce Ackerman, his greatest legacy – a legacy no longer seen because he was so effective – was to finally change the conversation away from Bickel, shifting the terrain of constitutional discourse, and in essence, putting Bickel to rest for a second time. [2] (I will return to Bickel and Ackerman when I take up the role of time in Age of Fracture.)

Alongside Bickel’s visage, the walls of the Yale Law School were covered with portraits of aging white men, so that for women, upon entering the building, it was hard not to think that you’d entered a men’s club. But the idea of this and other American law schools as men’s clubs was not simply metaphoric, as the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson found when she taught at Yale law school as a visiting professor in the early 80s. Settling in, she sought out a restroom. On her hallway was a door that said “Faculty.” Being a member of the faculty, she of course went in the door – only to find that she had entered a men’s bathroom. [3]

In September of 1980, there was more on the walls than Bickel and other greats from the history of the Yale Law School. The Age of Fracture was, thankfully, on display. There was an underground feminist organization at the law school – an organization that, sadly, I was never invited to join (I liked law school too much, so I was not to be trusted). These women had come in secretly in the night, in an age before security systems and surveillance cameras. Alongside the venerable portraits was a poster of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Over the faces of men on some of the portraits, they had hung paper plates on which they had drawn women’s faces. [4]

These were heady days at Yale for the Age of Fracture. In Rodgers’ narrative, the Federalist Society plays a role in the fracturing of legal thought. (Rodgers mentions the Federalist Society only briefly in his discussion of the conservative turn in legal thought, but he notes its success as part of the rise of a broader conservative legal intelligentsia.) [5] But from the way it looked from within the law school those days, I wonder whether the Federalist Society was part of the fracture. To us they looked like part of the furniture.

My classmates founded the Federalist Society. Well-funded from the start, they organized a conference – their first – held at Yale in 1982. The conference is remembered warmly in their celebratory organizational histories. George W. Hicks, Jr. writes: “At a time when the nation’s law schools are staffed largely by professors who dream of regulating from their cloistered offices every minute detail of our lives . . . the Federalists met—and proclaimed the virtues of individual freedom and of limited government.” [6]

I attended this meeting – as a picket. We did not picket their existence, or the idea of individual freedom. Instead we supported freedom: we supported abortion rights, and one of their speakers was a key supporter of the Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which wouldn’t limit government, but would criminalize abortion across the nation, undermining the very federalism that the Federalist Society sought to promote. If you support federalism, then you should support federalism, we argued.

The picketers are not written into the celebratory histories of the Federalist Society, though in debates at their meeting, some conservatives raised our point that their own principles would seem to support the ability of states to maintain their own rules, unimpeded by a nationalizing constitutional amendment.

For Rodgers, the Federalist Society and their colleagues helped to fracture a preexisting greater unity of ideas, which is certainly part of their own sense of origins. But there were multiple fracturings underway at the same time. We sought to shatter what to us seemed to be a hegemony furthered by our own classmates. For women on the margins, we sought to fracture a world that seemed to deny our experience. Our mere presence was a fracture. Perhaps this helps us to think about how we might write the next layer of the age of fracture – bringing the social and political history into the story, and layering the different narratives of fracture within each other, in a way that was simply not the project of Rodgers’ more sweeping narrative.

And I wonder if the periodization of fracture needs more nuance. There is an overlap at the beginning. We were still trying to break in in the early 80s, before Joan Scott and others shattered gender as a construct, as Rodgers takes up in chapter 5. Among ourselves, we were problematizing the collective “we” of earlier feminist writing, but we also needed that idea of gender solidarity in order to exist in an environment that seemed permeated with the unacknowledged gender solidarity of our male professors and students, and of the walls of the buildings themselves.

II. Time in the History of Constitutional Theory

What work is Time doing in the chapter “A Wrinkle in Time”? Sometimes “time” seems to be a stand-in for “history,” but the basic conceptualization of time, needed for there to be a “wrinkle in time” is the idea of time’s linearity. We might think of time’s linearity – its movement from a point in the past to (we hope) a distant point in the future is often assumed to a natural phenomenon. But our ideas about time come not from nature but from social life, Durkheim argued long ago. And even the idea of time’s linearity, anthropologist Carol Greenhouse has argued, itself comes from culture not from nature. [7]

William Sewell points to historians’ “implicit or working theories about social temporality.” Historians “believe that time is fateful,” he writes. “Time is irreversible,” as an event is lodged in the memory of those whom it affects and therefore irrevocably alters the situation in which it occurs.” Further, historians believe that

every act is part of a sequence of actions and that its effects are profoundly dependent upon its place in the sequence . . . . Historians assume that the outcome of any action, event, or trend is likely to be contingent, that its effects will depend upon the particular complex temporal sequence of which it is a part.

Rodgers’ understanding of the path of ideas in time is consistent with Sewell’s depiction of historians’ temporality. But within this framework, there is, for Sewell, a “diversity of temporalities” as well as an assumption that time is heterogeneous. He suggests that “Temporal heterogeneity implies causal heterogeneity. It implies that the consequences of a given act are not intrinsic in the act but rather will depend on the nature of the social world within which it takes place.” [8]

The contemporary history of time literature also stresses temporal heterogeneity. Thomas Allen writes: “the homogeneity of time that supposedly results from the centrality of such instruments as clocks, watches, and calendars to modern life is
only possible if technologies produce time by themselves.” Heterogeneous temporalities do not drive people apart, Allen argues, – so arguably are not the source of fractures – but instead “are themselves the threads out of which the fabric of national belonging has long been woven.” [9]

Age of Fracture seems to present its thinkers in a common temporality. The differences do not come from their experience of time, but instead from what they do with it. The constitutional originalists attempt to wrinkle time, he argues – to fold it back upon itself, so that present and past occupy the same moment.

In some ways, legal thought always involves this wrinkling. The past is always present in legal analysis because precedent – past cases – is an essential part of the lawyer’s tool kit. So I think the battle over constitutional theory in the 80s and after was not about whether to wrinkle time, but what sort of wrinkling was in order.

The 80s originalists, and the rest of constitutional theory, were working within the terms of Bickel’s critique of judicial review. Bickel was the most important voice in a series of works on the nature and role of judicial review in the aftermath of Brown, and also with the memory of the New Deal-era crisis over the court.

Bickel’s seminal contribution was the idea of the counter-majoritarian difficulty. In The Least Dangerous Branch, he argued that judicial review (the power of courts to strike down statutes) is inherently problematic in a democracy because courts overturn majoritarian will. Because of this, he argued for a restrained approach to judging.

1980s originalism was one answer to the counter-majoritarian difficulty. For Bickel, judges have a constitutional role, but that role must be constrained due to the counter-majoritarian difficulty. For other conservative legal thinkers, one way to constrain judicial review was originalism – so that judges would not be a band of platonic guardians displacing the majority’s will, but would play the more limited role warranted in a democracy. [10] Others, like liberal constitutional theorist John Hart Ely, also worked within the counter-majoritarian framework, carving out arguments for a more expansive role for courts within the terms of the counter-majoritarian difficulty. [11]

Putting Bickel in the center of the narrative might help us to see the originalists not as fracturing a conceptual order put in place by constitutional liberalism and the Warren Court. Instead, originalism was one methodology for responding to a critique that came earlier than the 80s, and was positioned not on the left but somewhere right of center.

Bruce Ackerman’s innovation was to argue that time mattered in a different way in constitutional theory, thereby pushing Bickel to the sidelines. “The people” – the nation’s constitutional sovereign – speak at different times in different ways, he argued, and it was in extraordinary “constitutional moments” (distinguished from everyday regular politics) that they articulate their foundational values which are then imbedded in the constitution’s meaning, whether or not the text of the constitution itself is amended. So for Ackerman, constitutional history simply had more wrinkles to it. There were more past moments that had to be brought forward to the present – most importantly the New Deal crisis over constitutional meaning, which, for Ackerman resulted not only in an extraordinary political moment, but the actual amendment of the constitution. [12]

In some ways, Ackerman’s work embodies Greenhouse’s argument that ideas of time come not from nature but from social life. The constitution’s times, for Ackerman, could not be determined from looking to formal signs, like the actual use of Article V to formally amend the constitution. Instead a constitution’s extraordinary times can be found in the life of the people, and the moments in which they take it upon themselves to infuse their age’s meaning into the constitution’s sparse words.

So in Age of Fracture, time works as an argument in legal thought, but not as an experience. I wonder whether future ages – for example an age in which electronic communications are immediate and fleeting – yet also enduring – with be thought to turn more fundamentally on an idea that the experience of time itself is fractured.

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1. Alexander Bickel’s most influential book is The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).

2. Bruce Ackerman’s turn away from Bickel’s critique of judicial review appears in a body of work including We the People, Volume 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1991).

3. Judith Jarvis Thomson told this story to members of the Yale Law Association, myself included, when we had lunch while she was visiting at Yale.

4. I was a first year student at Yale Law School in the fall of 1980.

5. Rogers, Age of Fracture, 8. For a more detailed treatment of the Federalist Society, see Stephen M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

6. George W. Hicks, Jr., “The Conservative Influence of the Federalist Society on the Harvard Law School Student Body,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 29 (Spring, 2006): 623-718.

7. Carol Greenhouse, A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

8. William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6–7, 9–10.

9. Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 10-11.

10. A particularly influential critique of originalism is H. Jefferson Powell, “The Original Understanding of Original Intent,” Harvard Law Review 98 (March 1984): 885-948.

11. John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

12. Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Volume 2: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1998).

Szefel on Rodgers (Part III of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

Dear readers: Lisa Szefel's review of Age of Fracture is the third installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here. For the second, see Jim Livingston's review here. Expect Mary Dudziak's comments to be posted soon, followed by a response by Dan Rodgers. [Parts of this paper were previously published on the History News Network website, February 24, 2011]

Daniel Rodgers is the Fred Astaire of intellectual history. Words and arguments flow across the page effortlessly. One idea glides to center stage then moves off as another waltzes forward. What I would like to do today is, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton: dance backwards and in high heels. I'd like to get up close and talk about Rodgers' steps.

In Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers offers an elegant, often eloquent, history of intellectual life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Primarily interested in the construction of ideas that shaped conceptions of history, society, and responsibility, he analyzes texts from an eclectic array of academic thinkers across the political spectrum. Rodgers argues that in the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists and political philosophers established the terms of the debate on a range of issues concerning the self and society, obligations and justice, morality and destiny. To these postwar intellectuals, ideas had severe consequences, contexts and nature constricted human action, and history loomed very large indeed.

While the turmoil and chaos of the 1960s caused tremors, it was not until the quakes of oil embargoes, unemployment, and inflation in the 1970s, that fault lines in this ideological consensus emerged. Into this breach, a lexicon of microeconomic principles, which had been forming for decades in libertarian circles that stressed agency, contingency, and reason emerged, promising solutions to seemingly intractable problems of disco-era stagflation. Instead of focusing on property and production, workers and owners, these economists celebrated instead the slight of (an invisible) hand that produced wealth and fostered the virtues of competition.

The vocabulary, metaphors, and grammar of the free market boosters seeped into academic discussions. Instead of the public solidity of politics and pressure groups, American historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars seeking to understand the formulations of class and exercise of power, now uncovered the ineluctable influence of culture and diffuse workings of hegemony. Gramsci, Geertz, and Foucault replaced Marxist dialectics while close readings of popular songs, prisons, and cockfights superseded analyses of elections, parties, and unions. This cultural turn reshaped the color line as well, as race came to be viewed less as a fixed state and more as a social construction. Notions of gender likewise became subject to preoccupations with language and consciousness-raising rather than investigations into the architecture of patriarchy.

Some other reviewers of the book, most notably Robert Westbrook, have mentioned some important omitted thinkers, most importantly, Martha Nussbaum and, I would add, Elaine Scarry. Other critiques highlight the lack, at times, of sufficient causal analyses. We see how but why did the language and values of free markets triumph so decisively? How did the fall of Communism across Europe and in Russia affect attitudes toward liberal Democrats in America who, for decades, had insisted that the Soviet economy was out-performing domestic capitalism? Cold War triumphalism, after all, was grounded in the reality that the prime alternative to free markets had been defeated. In that scenario, why heed those who were wrong?

Along those lines, why didn’t liberals offer a stouter defense of communitarian principles? Focusing on the progressives’ multicultural and linguistic turn leaves unexamined some dramatic mistakes made by liberal politicians and their supporters, which diminished their credibility. It also ignores the many images of fat cat Democratic power players showing up for budget talks, after the federal government had been shut down, in limousines.

None of this went unnoticed among the working class in those parts of the country hardest hit by deindustrialization—the manufacturing cities of the Midwest and Northeast—who switched party affiliation to become Sunbelt and Rustbelt Republicans. The usual story about backlash and resentment, perpetrated famously in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas, misses the point. Rodgers, however, is on the right track. A more vertical study that presents a cross-section of values would help to illuminate the common bonds that tied blue collar and Catholics to blue blood conservatives. This is something that is missing in the history of conservatism more generally.

An intellectual historian who clearly delineates his methodology, Rodgers rarely ventures outside the realm of books and articles to explain how conceptions are formed, leading to some connections that ring hollow. In discussing the post-Fordist focus on the present, for example, no mention is made of CNN, personal computers, or the ubiquity of media images. Ideas about race are dissected without analysis of the impact wielded by rap music, MTV, or films like “Boyz n the Hood,” giving the appearance that Charles Murray was primarily responsible for stereotypes that linked skin color to violence. However, Murray said little that Archie Bunker hadn’t already articulated more than a decade earlier and, while liberals were busy decrying the possessive investment in whiteness, ethnic Americans were denouncing the possessive investment in racism among the well-heeled. While lending sheen and coherence to a neat narrative about fracture, the methodology of this particular type of intellectual history can skew analysis of issues and omit important developments." So, while I appreciate the coherence and precision with which Rodgers traces ideas--from left to right, from economics textbooks to presidential podiums. Sometimes this approach--tracing the ebb and flow of ideas--is highly appropriate. Sometimes, however, it belies the way ideas actually circulate or the way history happens. I wonder: What is lost or distorted when intellectual history is not tied to social and cultural history?

Along these lines, I don't believe in trickle down economics and I don't know that trickle down intellectual history is the best representation of the way ideas emerge and circulate. What about trickle up intellectual history (or, for that matter, trickle up economics)? Who should we include as members of the "communities of discourse" that we examine? (There was a nice debate about this on the USIH blog earlier this year).

I mentioned earlier that I would like to dance backwards and in high heels. Let me now add "in drag": Rodgers devotes three pages to the topic of AIDS. In his examination of race and racism, conversely, Rodgers delves deep and wide, devoting an entire chapter to the topic and strewing comments throughout the text. He even makes a rare foray into pop culture, nodding toward the contributions of Sanford & Son, the television mini-series Roots, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. He discusses “the new black presence in public life” and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and black arts movement, and he goes into loving detail about the conscious quest of African American authors to inculcate race pride. He cites polls from Black Enterprise magazine about black solidarity and decries the “day-to-day injuries imposed by the social marks of race in American society.” Willie Horton, Jesse Jackson, the Los Angeles riots, Anita Hill, and the debate among black intellectuals about the persistence of poverty are all there. The chapter on gender is less comprehensive but still works toward explaining relevant questions.

However, where are the gay intellectuals, writers, and activists? Where are Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, Larry Kramer, Sarah Schulman, Cleve Jones, John D’Emilio’s landmark, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), The Celluloid Closet (1996), Lauren Berlant, Gayle Rubin, Matthew Shepard, and Ellen Degeneres? Where are the concerns about injuries inflicted on gay Americans, about their struggle for pride and dignity in the midst of denial and death?

Citing this omission is not just a plea for inclusion of yet another oppressed group. As Eva Sedgwick argues in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), leaving out queer voices distorts the historical lens. And, if these voices are needed to understand any era, it is most certainly the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years when anti-gay bigotry was embedded in social and intellectual life, when homophobia blanketed, like a fine layer of soot, the nation. What other community suffered as many casualties as a result of the government’s inaction? Estimates place the number of lynchings during Jim Crow as high as 5,000. Over 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. The number of reported AIDS deaths from 1980 through 1997 in the United States is 641,087. Globally 30.6 million people were infected.

Let me say that, citing these statistics is not an exercise in comparative victimology. First, comparative history is a legitimate enterprise. Second, juxtaposition can be useful to bring a stunning reality into bold relief.

Today, approximately 5,000 people die every day because of AIDS, a global calamity that, some scientists argue, could have been controlled had the federal government responded swiftly in 1981 to news of deaths, as it was, most famously, in Australia. But in America the victims were members of a hated, marginalized minority and received no compassion, a key emotion that Rodgers seeks to trace as it relates to the poor. As Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On documented, the CDC and NIH were chronically underfunded. As Reagan biographer Lou Cannon concluded, Reagan's response was "halting and ineffective."

If Rodgers was reaching for a capacious survey of shaping intellectual ideas, how could he ignore this disease or the ideologies and language that allowed it to become a pandemic? The word AIDS itself would benefit from a Rodgers-style definition. Paula Treichler takes on this challenge to analyze the construction of AIDS as an “epidemic of signification” with culture, medicine, linguistics, socioeconomic status, gender, class, and race all influencing scientific naming practices. Considering the emotional and physical toll, it is no wonder that LGBT activist and intellectual Urvashi Vaid writes that “For lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people, the Reagan-Bush years were the worst years of our lives.”

At the heart of the Reagan-Bush era, the moral center of the period, is the AIDS crisis, the callous reaction to victims, and the lurid homophobia that sanctioned isolation and death. Historians, as a profession, have not come to terms with these events. Look at the index to almost any book on the 1980s and AIDS along with the hatred of gay people that fueled the epidemic are barely mentioned, those who do mostly talk about the response to AIDS among homosexual Americans only and the formulations of difficult to read queer theorists.

I do believe that writing a history about this period without addressing the AIDS pandemic is like writing a history of the George Bush years without talking about 9/11. AIDS and the diminishing calculus of compassion during the Reagan era are linked. Conservatism drew its force from antipathy toward a group of people who loved differently. This animus animated evangelicals and justified indifference to AIDS sufferers among Catholic leaders. It can be found everywhere in sermons, political speeches, journals, and newspapers. It inflected thinking on what constituted “normal,” on sex and gender more generally as well as reproductive rights. William Bennett, included in Age of Fracture for work that expounds on virtues, was Secretary of Education, who, along with his Undersecretary Gary Bauer (who later became head of the Family Research Council), served as the principle spokesmen for Reagan’s AIDS policies. Instead of disseminating information to educate people about how transmission occurred and how to prevent infection, these two guys were too worried about saying anything even remotely positive about gay people. Precious time was lost. Lives were lost.

I also wonder about historical context and if we need to consider authorial intention, that elusive quest that Roland Barthes deemed futile. Rick Warren receives mention by Rodgers for forging “more generous even radical frames for evangelical Protestant social thought” but not for barring gays from membership in his Saddleback Church. Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture war” speech gets airing for its patriotic invocations, but not his snide remarks about “homosexual rights” and denunciation of gay marriage as “amoral.” Irving Kristol’s work in the knowledge industry is acknowledged but not his charge that homosexuality was a “disease” (Reagan himself referred to it as “a tragic illness”). The issue of gays in the military and same sex marriage played a decisive role in elections, including ballot initiatives in the 1970s, and get-out-the-vote anti-homosexual campaigns, gay-bashing, and gay-baiting in campaigns since then, even affecting the outcome of presidential contests between the “straight panic” years of 1996 and 2004. If Rodgers is interested in the power of ideas, why doesn’t he analyze the origins and allure of anti-gay ideas? In our question and answer period, I hope we will discuss whether the motive of the people we analyze should form part of our analysis. How should intellectual historians consider statements motivated by bigotry and the desire to promote intolerance?

What would Age of Fracture look like if it had included this subject? On some matters, it would have reinforced his assertions. John D’Emilio’s classic essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” would have fortified the convictions held by many that free markets induced freedom. With pastors and ministers expending tremendous energy, expounding wrathfully on homosexuality as an abomination and blaming victims for their “choice” little room was left to speak of Jesus as the man who overturned the money tables, preached poverty, humbleness, compassion, and charity, the very kind of emotional economy that Rodgers is interested in mapping.

On other important points, Rodgers would have found his organizing principle, around fracture, did not hold or at least that it was more contested. For example, by citing Butler’s notion of sexuality as a performance, he gives only one side of the debate between nature and nurture. A very large constituency of gay people themselves argued publicly for essentialism. The debate played out on the pages of Time and Newsweek, National Review, The Advocate and Slate.com, with scientific studies examining the role of genes and hormones in determining sexual orientation. At stake in this ontological question was whether gayness was akin to race and thus deserved legal protections or a choice that could be changed (and criticized).

On a final note: Who mourns for the gay men and women who either committed suicide, lived closeted lives filled with fear and anguish, alienated from family, friends, church, and denied the opportunity to build their own families or to love who they loved. I understand it is not the historian's job to hold pity parties, but I wonder if empathy is a necessary first step before historians start weaving the experiences of gay people into the story of our past. It is certainly within our realm of responsibility to try to understand, as Ranke would say, how it really was, to see not only flawless execution but missteps, and trips, and dips, to assess not just waltzes, but break dancing, the Hustle, the rumba, the samba, and cha-cha-cha.

Livingston on Rodgers (Part II of AGE OF FRACTURE roundtable)

(Addition: March 18, 2012: ArtsBeat readers: Welcome to the USIH blog, where Daniel Rodgers's Age of Fracture has been a topic of much discussion over the past year. Please see this post for links to several threads discussing Rodgers's book.)

Dear readers: James Livingston's review of Age of Fracture is the second installment in our roundtable. For the first, see my review here.

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It’s a pleasure to be here to comment on new work by Daniel T. Rodgers. As intellectual historians, we’ve been obliged to read whatever he wrote since the dissertation book on the work ethic—or rather, as students of this thing called America, whatever our specialization, we’ve been obliged to keep up with what he’s writing about our thing. You can’t say that about very many historians.

As some of you know, I wrote a book about the same period covered by Age of Fracture. It is by far the better book on the intellectual history of the late 20th century—I mean his, of course. I wish I had tarried with the negative as long as he has in this painstaking elegy, this elegant tombstone, this heartbreaking funeral oration—I almost said jeremiad—but then I had cartoons to cover. There’s no better book on the subject, and I can’t imagine there will be in my lifetime, maybe yours as well.

In its ambition and scope, Age of Fracture reminds me of nothing so much as James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory, the definitive work on the Atlantic world of intellectual development at another fin de siecle moment (again, there’s no better book on the subject, however pointed your disagreements with the author might be). Still, there’s a huge difference between these books. It’s hard to put into words because it resides in the tone, the pitch, the timbre of the texts, not in some telling lyrical content I can quote. And I suppose the difference could be explained simply, by the fact that Professor Kloppenberg was removed from the scene of the intellectual innovations he studied, whereas Professor Rodgers is a participant-observer, present at their creation, and can’t yet report any victory, however uncertain, for any side in an ongoing struggle. But look at the difference from another angle. No matter how you read Uncertain Victory, it’s the promise of uncertainty that sticks with you. No matter how you read Age of Fracture, it’s the threat of uncertainty that sticks with you, whether it’s the risk created by undisciplined market forces or the chaos determined by intellectual anarchy.

Read almost any book on the turn of the earlier century and you will come away knowing that every previous truth was whirled away in a tidal wave of change that spanned every possible dimension of human experience, from the economic and the social to the political and the intellectual, from the private to the public, from the domestic to the trans-national. You will come away from these books knowing that every brute inversion of received wisdom could be called progress because the truth was suddenly fungible, like property and personhood at the law.

You will come away knowing that William James had the last word on the topic when he offered this cruelly semiotic rendition of the truth: “Day follows day, and its contents are simply added. The new contents are not themselves true, they simply come and are. Truth is what we say about them.”

Indeed the books focused on the last fin de siecle demonstrate that our own age of fracture is neither a beginning nor an end: it’s a new variation on old themes which has nonetheless changed what we can see and hear and feel—what we take for granted in the here and now. What great writers, artists, and intellectuals could glimpse by standing at the heart of change a century ago, telling us where it would lead, we can now see clearly, as embodied in our everyday lives: what was then evident yet unknown, except to the avant garde, is now common sense. That’s why “post-modernism” became a household word in the late 20th century—also an epithet, a slogan, even radio call letters, just another item in the inventory of popular culture. That’s why the de-centering of everything, including the familiar sources and sites of power, could begin at the same moment to look normal if not normative, in Eastern Europe as well as the United States.

James compared the potential consequences of pragmatism and its cultural predicates to the effects of the Reformation—he thought of both as social-intellectual movements that made truth plural, extra-institutional, and practical, rather than unitary, bureaucratic, and metaphysical. It was a playful, hopeful metaphor, but it retains some cash value, I think, in understanding the late-20th century, when the political valence of protest against the powers that be became unpredictable, even indecipherable, sometimes regressive and often murderous. That’s what happens when the dispersal of power from the clerics to the congregation, or from the state to society, becomes normal if not normative.

As that dispersal did become normal in the late-20th century, with the rise of cultural-sexual politics on the one hand and a neo-liberal movement toward deregulation on the other—not to mention the more dramatic breakdown of fossilized states in Eastern Europe—so did the languages needed to address the fugitive complexities of power become more various, more cultural, more oblique, more tentative, and more useful. I mean that these languages and their attendant categories didn’t “thin out,” as Professor Rodgers argues; instead, they proliferated, along with the aliases and addresses of power.

We might even treat the emergence of rational market ideology as an instance of the same dispersal. Professor Rodgers assumes that this ideology willfully or ignorantly obscured the institutional determinants of economic power. Let’s grant him that assumption. What if that was the point, all along? Could it be that these economists were abstracting or abstaining from the question of power as traditionally construed, just like the Foucauldians on the other side of campus, and trying to redefine its habitat and its effects, as if the institutional determinants—like corporations, trade unions, and state regulatory agencies—were becoming less important than the echoes of the algorithms?

Could we then treat rational market ideology as an interesting, maybe even productive dimension of the intellectual earthquake that turned the world inside out in the late 20th century? Could we treat it as something more (or less) than a retreat from reality, as a new way of grasping what James called the “existing beyond”—that is, the impending future—as a vital dimension of the present? In other words, could we treat the “financial model” derived from the Black-Scholes algorithms as distant echoes of Irving Fisher’s mathematics and Albert Einstein’s relativity theorems (both published 1905-1907), thus as a new way of incorporating time into the calculations of the market? Or rather, wouldn’t Professor Rodgers be on firmer ground—oops—if he argued that rational market ideology was a redefinition rather than a displacement of time, historical and otherwise?

I know, free markets and political progress don’t mix—deregulation is the cause of all our troubles!—so why would I look for the latter in the former and use my discoveries as a criticism of Age of Fracture? Good questions, but only if you assume, as Professor Rodgers does (and I’d bet everybody else in this room does too), that markets and socialism are the terms of an either/or choice, or that capitalism and markets are synonyms, or that the commodity form is the solvent of all that is precious, or that anything with a price is by definition an affront to authenticity.

I’m trying to say that I agree with the broad arc of the narrative Professor Rodgers offers us—rational market ideology becomes the regnant paradigm in allocating worldly goods as well as academic or intellectual rewards, thus installing price systems as the foundational metaphor of late-20th century thinking as such—but I can’t enter the same complaint that he treats as the self-evident moral of the story. Here’s why.

Stagflation in the West and political-economic impasse in the East coincided in the 1970s. The outsiders, the radicals, the dissidents, and the misfits in both places offered perestroika as a solution to the problem they faced—more “marketization,” as the Polish and Czech economists put it in their manifestos, having anticipated, even planned for, the Prague Spring, and then been disillusioned by the experiment before the tanks rolled in. “Deregulation,” as the American economists and politicians put it—Alfred Kahn, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and Felix Rohatyn out front—in an attempt to revitalize competitive market forces, in keeping with the anti-monopoly, anti-trust tradition that galvanized American politics in the 19th century.

The “marketization” of more assets, including ideas, followed in both parts of the world, East and West, as Vaclav Havel had predicted. So did better prospects for political democracy, cultural pluralism, and intellectual innovation, as the dispersal of power from state to society became normal, and finally normative. Meanwhile, underneath or alongside the “marketization” of more assets—and perhaps as a direct result of this process, as when the family was codified as the principal bulwark against the anonymous forces of the market?—came a strange new phenomenon that I have elsewhere called primitive disaccumulation.

In Atlantic Crossings, Professor Rodgers began by drawing our attention to the “de-commodification” of things and ideas at the very moment industrial capitalism triumphed, in the early 20th century. He quickly and inexplicably dropped this promising notion as he traced the intellectual vectors of reform and regulation that reshaped the political landscapes of the US and the UK.

But is it not worth pursuing as the secret history of an age of fracture determined by “marketization”? Isn’t primitive disaccumulation happening under our feet—right under our noses—and thereby making the victory of markets and neo-liberalism uncertain at least?

Consider these facts. More people have easier access to better information than ever, and they don’t have to pay for it, whether by enduring TV commercials or buying a newspaper subscription. More people read more stuff, meanwhile producing and distributing their own writing via the blogosphere, than ever before, but it’s mostly free. More people listen to more music, and more people produce and distribute their own music than ever before, but they’re not buying CDs—they’re not paying for it, they’re downloading it. You can buy a used book by a semi-famous author just weeks after the publication date for one sixth the cover price; ask any editor outside of trade publishing, and she’ll tell you that her business model is not something to bank on. You can be sure that in ten years, maybe five, newspapers as we buy them now will be gone, regardless of how the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times or the paper of record now try to protect their contents.

And movies? The CEOs here are a step ahead of their counterparts in the music or the newspaper business, but it still looks like YouTube is the future of your viewing pleasure.

In sum: The reading, listening, and viewing audiences are larger, but the commodity form organizes less of their attention—the markets and the price systems that used to deliver the relevant goods are now options, not unavoidable structures that govern every approach to these goods. This is the incomplete reversal of primitive accumulation, the process by which almost all things, even human nature itself, became commodities. Primitive disaccumulation, I like to call it. And it coincides with the apparent triumph of rational market ideology.

You would never know it from reading Age of Fracture. Here you will find yet another complaint about the ascendance of markets and their nefarious attendants, in accordance with the academic Left’s assumption that deregulation is the cause of the current crisis and that re-regulation is the cure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that Professor Rodgers has neglected a side of the subject that happens to be my special interest, as in those reviews that wonder why the author didn’t argue what the reviewer wanted to, if only he had written the book. I’m suggesting instead that an inchoate, open-ended ambivalence about capitalism is a central, unavoidable dimension of late-20th century intellectual history, perhaps because the Internet made the disposition of and reward for intellectual property such live cultural issues. Neo-conservatism itself is predicated, pretty clearly, on this ambivalence, as even a casual reading of Irving Kristol, the founding father, would suggest. It begins with doubts about Hayek and Friedman, not enthusiastic embrace.

“The” market doesn’t ever exist as an inert externality or a unitary device. Markets do, of course, exist, but their languages vary, and they don’t emerge or endure in the absence of rules, symbols, gestures, and thoughts that change over time and space. Moreover, these variations never cancel the progressive, democratic possibilities still resident within socialism—socialism, by the way, is not necessarily progressive or democratic—even though, and even when, we frame the issues as an either/or choice between markets and social democracy. I’m one of those people who believes, on historical grounds, that liberty and equality require markets as a social-intellectual presupposition; but I also believe, on the same grounds, that if they are to work properly, markets require democracy.

In these terms, Robert Westbrook is right to place me at a respectful remove from the position that Professor Rodgers has so poignantly and brilliantly mapped in Age of Fracture. I still see the promise of uncertainty: I don’t want to know where we’re going, not just yet. I like to think that for all the mourning that Professor Rodgers does in this indispensable book, he doesn’t want to, either.

Book Review: Hartman on Rodgers, *Age of Fracture*

All That Is Solid Fractures
Andrew Hartman

(Note: This review formed my comments as part of a roundtable on Age of Fracture at the U.S. Intellectual History Conference 2011. Stay tuned for further roundtable posts.)

“All that is solid melts into air.” Marx and Engels, 1848

“Concepts of society fragmented.” Daniel T. Rodgers, 2011

“All that is solid melts into air,” one of the more memorable of the many pithy allegories from The Communist Manifesto—which Marshall Berman playfully calls “the first great modernist work of art”—has persisted as a persuasive metaphor for the modern experience. Permanence has been “pitilessly torn asunder,” replaced by compulsory obsolescence. For many, this modern transformation is felt as vertigo, and as loss, anxieties given voice to by Jackson Lears, who laments the modern uprooting of “people from kin and communal ties, transforming them into mobile, interchangeable units of ‘human capital.’” For antimodernists in general, the separation of the self from longstanding bonds of mutuality produces disastrous, even inhuman consequences. For antimodernist leftists like Lears, uprooted people are seemingly incapable of collective resistance to capitalist dehumanization. But for Marx and Engels, and for latter-day modernists like Berman, rootlessness is to be embraced as a weapon against estrangement: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Daniel Rodgers offers a similarly explanatory metaphor for recent U.S. intellectual history: ours is an “age of fracture.” Since the 1970s, “the terrain of common sense shifted.” Structuralist and other “strong readings” of society have given way to disaggregation. Rodgers writes: “Notions of power moved out of structures and into culture. Identities became intersectional and elective. Concepts of society fragmented. Time became penetrable. Even the slogans of the culture war’s conservatives were caught up in the swirl of choice.” But whereas the “all that is solid” analogy explains modern cultural change as a by-product of capitalism—culture as epiphenomenal to “the dull compulsion of economic relations”—for Rodgers, “the age of fracture” is a metaphor that arises from a world where the boundaries between perception and reality are porous to non-existent. To those who want to know what explains the age of fracture, or to whom we should assign blame, Rodgers offers no solace, only ambiguity: “Which foot moved first? Did the economic transformations of late capitalism set loose these new debates? Or did ideas move first? My response is neither and both.”

In addition to ambiguity, Age of Fracture exudes ambivalence, a moral position neither for nor against our age. Like the modernists, Rodgers sees no point pretending we can go back to the way it was. But like the antimodernists, Rodgers is unsettled by the present condition. This is evident in his disapproval of many of our age-defining ideas, the worst of which seem to find the most acolytes. In what might be my favorite aspect of his approach, Rodgers heaps polite abuse, if there is such a thing, on several such bad arguments. For instance, in his analysis of the “law and economics” movement that found a home in prestigious law schools such as the University of Chicago, where Richard Posner holds court, Rodgers makes quick if mannerly work of the movement’s seminal text, Ronald Coase’s 1960 article, “The Problem of Social Cost.”

Coase’s Noble-prize winning argument went as follows: since social efficiency is best achieved when two parties are left alone to bargain their way out of their conflicting positions, civil litigation need not be weighed down by such quaint considerations as justice. Rodgers’s concise critique then follows as such: “The social good was a maximization problem in aggregate market value: crops and cattle, property values and pollution-abatement costs, not, he had been candid enough to say, any close assessment of who stood best to bear the pain of the compromise or how unequally matched their resources might have been at the outset.” The precision with which Rodgers implicitly unmasks the most significant problem with Coase’s crude brand of utilitarianism, that in failing to account for historically-rooted power imbalances it empowers those best positioned to benefit from the “free market,” works in microcosm as an argument against the microeconomic impulses that define the age of fracture: the seemingly neutral application of microeconomics, the prototypical weak reading of society, to theretofore macro-problems, is anything but neutral.

One of the more odious representations of the microeconomic contagion was libertarian Charles Murray’s racialist 1984 book, Losing Ground, a de facto handbook for several Reagan administration domestic policymakers. Murray argued that expensive Great Society programs designed to alleviate poverty actually resulted in increased poverty, the unintended consequence of the ironic incentives built into welfare policy. According to Murray, after calculating the costs and benefits of marrying and seeking employment, a poor couple, whom he imagined as rational economic actors “Harold” and “Phyllis,” would have concluded that it made more sense to remain unmarried and on welfare. Rodgers crisply summarizes the implications of Murray’s contention: “The cure constructed the disease and fed on its own perverse failures.”

The seductiveness of Murray’s microeconomic solution was obvious, especially in an era defined by austerity: doing less was both inexpensive and achieved a better result. At a time when urban poverty seemed more and more intractable, and more and more linked to racial inequality—evident in the racialized discourse of the so-called “underclass”—Murray’s “benign neglect” approach proved salient, particularly since the electorate was impatient with political measures that appeared to benefit blacks.

It is no surprise, then, that Losing Ground helped lay the foundation for Clinton’s “end welfare as we know it” legislation. But just because Murray’s anti-welfare screed was influential does not make it right. Rodgers undermines Murray’s “tendentious” and “slipshod” argument by pointing to some pesky facts, such that the percentage of welfare mothers had remained constant since the late 1960s, and that the number of unwed mothers had only gone up relative to the number of married mothers because married couples were having fewer children. Rodgers also relays that “the incidence of poverty had, in fact, fallen sharply in the Great Society years that Murray had surveyed.” Government inaction, then, was an unlikely means to economic equality given that inequality was the result of historical power imbalances that the Great Society successfully, if inadequately, counter-balanced. Add to that the sympathetic reading that Rodgers gives to structural considerations of racial inequality—“to be born into a society marked by race was to be born into a system saturated with power”—and it seems clear that Rodgers seeks to correct the faulty microeconomic interpretations prevalent in the age of fracture by layering them with macro forms of analysis.

In his final chapter, “Wrinkles in Time,” about the proclivity with which assorted political actors construed the past in anti-historical fashion, as if “one could penetrate through the incomplete and muddled historical record to its original, undistorted core,” Rodgers analyzes the development of “originalism,” a legal principle popular amongst conservative jurists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Originalists theorized that jurisprudence should be constrained by an absolute understanding of the Constitution, in terms of either its original meaning or the original intent of those who framed it. Although microeconomic legal thinkers like Richard Posner sharply criticized originalism’s anti-utilitarian neglect of “consequences in the world of fact,” the two forms of jurisprudence were flip sides of the same noxious anti-contextualist coin: where microeconomic legal theorists contended that legal interpretation should avoid historically-structured concepts like justice, originalists fantasized that the law, properly understood, folded time over onto itself so as to escape history.

Obstreperous U.S. District Judge Brevard Hand, who “set out to show that history proved the Supreme Court wrong” on its rulings on religion in school, made arguments from his Alabama bench in the early 1980s that served as an important precursor to the originalist movement, particularly in his disagreement with incorporation, a process by which portions of the Bill of Rights were applied at the state level. Among other revolutionary legal transformations, the precedent set by incorporation led to the 1962 Engel v. Vitale landmark decision that ruled school prayer violated the First Amendment. In contrast, based on a properly originalist understanding of the Constitution, Hand declared that states were not bound by the First Amendment and, as such, that Alabamans were free to establish religious practices of their choosing.

Rodgers obligingly lays out the obvious criticism of originalism: it distorted the history of the framing of the Constitution, which was, after all, a careful compromise between partisans who held multiple, often oppositional intentions. But his most damning charge is that originalists were ignorant of historical structure: “The originalist argument tapped not a desire to go back to any actual past but a desire to escape altogether from time’s slipperiness—to locate a trap door through which one could reach beyond history and find a simpler place outside of it.”

In making his devastating critique of conservative anti-structuralist thought, Rodgers shows that structural notions of power mattered where weak readings of society led to conservative conclusions. Coarse could only make the case that aggregate social efficiency should be the judicial system’s core objective by deflecting structural inequality, the consideration of which required giving thought to concepts infused with history, such as justice. Murray could only argue that welfare destroyed incentives for poor people to find jobs by ignoring the structural causes of unemployment, such as the trade policies that decimated the urban-industrial job sector, thus impoverishing large pockets of inhabitants in cities across the nation. Hand could only contend that the Constitution did not stipulate for incorporation by thinking of the document as devoid of history, by erasing two centuries of American jurisprudence that had ineluctably given constitutional law new meaning. In sum, it might seem that Rodgers is a structuralist doing battle with anti-structuralist ideas. But this is a selective reading of Age of Fracture. For although he respects some structural explanations, Rodgers also believes historical change can result from the power evinced by free-floating contrivances such as metaphors: market metaphors shape new material realities, and vice versa, new market forms give life to new metaphors. Rodgers, then, employs a soft poststructuralist methodology. As such, his critique of anti-structural ideas is mostly confined to those with conservative manifestations. In contrast, he shows some sympathy for left-leaning forms of poststructuralism, such as the cultural turn taken by the historical discipline.

Rodgers analyzes the historiographic cultural turn under the rubric of “the search for power,” which, for historians, “led to a virtual abandonment of the terrain of economics for new worlds of culture.” In other words, “power grew less tangible, less material, more pervasive, more elusive until, in some widespread readings of power, it became all but impossible to trace or pin down.” Much of this owed to the influence of French theory, especially Foucault’s evocative notion that discourse was everything, which collapsed the brackets separating material and linguistic sources of power, a particularly convincing framework for those who studied the constructedness of race and gender. But the cultural turn in American historiography predated the French invasion by a decade or so, when historians of the United States eagerly embraced E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson’s cultural Marxism, which inscribed the working class with agency, had an enormous impact on this side of the Atlantic. “It formed an outlet for the politics of consciousness that had run so strongly through the new left, the civil rights movement, and feminism. Culture gave historical ‘agency’ to the common folk of history, who had so little else to offer.” Less optimistically, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of power, another cultural Marxist-inspired paradigm that went by the name of “hegemony,” was paramount in popularizing ideas about the top-down power of culture, as opposed to Thompson’s bottom-up power. In Rodgers’s eloquent words: “Hegemony was the power of the dominant class not only to impose its social categories on others but also, and still more, to make its system of meaning come to seem the natural order of things, so that by insensibly absorbing that order the many consented to the domination of the few.” The most important American historian working in the Gramscian school was Eugene Genovese, who famously argued in Roll, Jordan, Roll that the agency of the slaves—“the world the slaves made”—though significant, was only possible within a “system of meaning” made to seem natural to those who inhabited slave society. In other words, slave agency was constrained by a reified vision of slavery’s social parameters.

Both of these readings of history, whether in the guise of Thompson’s rosy understanding or Genovese’s dour interpretation, remained tied to the structural form of historical analysis that went by the name of Marxism. And yet, Thompson and Genovese’s understandable attempt to make sense of how the oppressed were able to resist power, if at all, led them to innovate a sort of soft poststructuralist approach that emphasized culture as a motive force unto itself. This, in turn, created a bridge to more radically poststructuralist readings of history, readings beyond even Foucauldian, such as the feminist destabilizing of identity, best enunciated by Judith Butler, or the deconstruction of race as a stable category, a position eventually taken by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Interestingly, Rodgers comes across as sympathetic to this left-leaning move away from historical structure. Perhaps this is because leftist poststructuralism could be interpreted as less radically anti-structuralist than the conservative obliteration of history. More likely, the degree to which Rodgers is more sympathetic to the poststructural turn taken by left-leaning theoreticians than he is to the anti-structuralist turn taken by conservative intellectuals is predicated more on politics than epistemology. Maybe this is fine, since the link between politics and epistemology is often unclear. Anti-foundationalists like Richard Rorty have found some common political ground with foundationalists like Noam Chomsky. Arguably, Rodgers is adhering to one of the fundamental principles of philosophical pragmatism: he is basing his conclusions about different forms of anti-structuralism on their varied political results. And yet, an inconsistency redounds from Rodgers’s selective readings of anti-structuralism.

If results matter more than epistemology in determining the quality of an idea, then the structural critique of conservative anti-structuralism is groundless: what matters in judging originalism is not that it toyed with time in radically anachronistic ways, but that it resulted in a less liberal society, the political standard by which Rodgers tacitly judges ideas. Of course, what this stark juxtaposition makes clear is the absurdity of the argument. Originalism is bad politics precisely because it is bad epistemology, and vice versa. In other words, epistemology often presupposes politics.

To sum this up, a poststructuralist critique of a poststructuralist age is a paradox, fitting perhaps, but still a paradox. To be fair, Rodgers is not a social critic. He is a historian, and Age of Fracture is, first and foremost, historical scholarship, agenda-setting at that. However, Rodgers seems to want intellectual history to double as social criticism (though he is far subtler in going about this than was someone like Christopher Lasch). Insofar as Age of Fracture is a piece of social criticism, it lacks the razor-sharp edge of someone who takes aim from a position of alienation. Though Rodgers is uncomfortable with some of the conservative ideas that gained traction in the age of fracture, he seems to have made peace with the anti-structuralist zeitgeist in ways that antimodernists and Marxists alike cannot abide.

Judge W. Brevard Hand, Intellectual Historian

United States federal judge W. Brevard Hand (1924-2008) was one of the more important conservative intellectuals of the culture wars. And yet his significance is rarely recognized. His opinion in the infamous “Alabama Textbook Case” (1987)—published as American Education on Trial: Is Secular Humanism a Religion?, with an introduction by Richard John Neuhaus—is the work of a creative and far-reaching conservative intellectual. In fact, it reads like an intellectual history of secular humanism.

In Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers briefly discusses the obstreperous Hand in the context of his discussion of constitutional originalism, part of his “wrinkles in time” chapter. Hand, as Rodgers writes, “set out to show that history proved the Supreme Court wrong” on its rulings on religion in school. As such, he made arguments from his Alabama bench in the early 1980s that served as an important precursor to the originalist movement, particularly in his disagreement with incorporation, a process by which portions of the Bill of Rights were applied at the state level. Among other revolutionary legal transformations, the precedent set by incorporation led to the 1962 Engel v. Vitale landmark decision that ruled school prayer violated the First Amendment. In contrast, based on a properly originalist understanding of the Constitution, Hand declared that states were not bound by the First Amendment and, as such, that Alabamans were free to establish religious practices of their choosing.

Hand’s early originalism proved influential, especially to Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, who made it the cornerstone of how the Reagan administration would deal with religious freedom issues. The Reagan administration openly pushed for prayer in public schools following this logic. Hand’s interpretation also influenced future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, among others. But Hand’s creative conservative jurisprudence did not end there. For in the 1983 case where he made his name as an originalist—Wallace v. Jaffree—Hand anticipated that the Supreme Court would reject his logic regarding incorporation. Thus, he helped the defendants in that case, those associated with the Alabama law that set aside one minute in the school day for school prayer or the equivalent in quiet contemplation, construct an alternative legal rationale for their actions. If it was determined that the Alabama law violated the First Amendment “establishment clause,” via incorporation, then Hand and the defendants-cum-plaintiffs sought to make their case by going through the “no establishment” provision. In other words, Hand sought to use the incorporation precedent against itself by making the case that “secular humanism” was a religion, and furthermore, that it was the established religion of the public schools, and thus, that it violated the religious freedom of Christians. This is an example of how conservative Christians often made use of multicultural “rights” language to advance their causes during the culture wars.

The “Alabama Textbook Case” (Smith v. Board of School Commissioners) (1987), then, was an attempt by Judge Hand and the plaintiffs, comprised of several hundred Alabama citizens, including teachers, to prove that secular humanism was the operant religion of the public schools by way of a close reading of textbooks. As Hand wrote: “What this case is about, is the allegedly improper promotion of certain religious beliefs, thus violating the constitutional prohibitions against the establishment of religion, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.” The Neuhaus introduction nicely sets the stage for the nearly-100-page opinion that followed. Neuhaus argued that what Hand’s interlocutions proved was that “the law with respect to religion and public education is in a terrible jumble,” which is hardly controversial no matter your dog in this fight. In his book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, David Sehat makes a similar point from a very different perspective. He contends that the liberal mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court that overturned the moral establishment based its decisions on bad history, which encouraged dissent. “By underselling the liberalizing rationale for their decisions,” Sehat explains, “the Court created a damaging uncertainty as to its purpose in taking on these cases.” Furthermore: “In not acknowledging past religious power and not explaining that that power had led to an unfair exclusion or coercion of individuals, the Court left obscure the reason that it felt compelled to act in the first place, which in turn allowed conservatives to press their claims without acknowledging their desire for a return to coercion.”

Neuhaus also analyzes the work and influence of John Dewey in ways that I do in my book, Education and the Cold War, though, as with Sehat, I come from a very different vantage point from Neuhaus. In seeking to concur with Hand that secular humanism was indeed a religion, Neuhaus pointed to the influence of John Dewey, who was open and honest about his secular humanist position. “The main defendant, be it understood, is the venerable John Dewey.” More: “Dewey lives on, so to speak, in the establishment philosophy of government education today.” And more still: “If fish could write a report on their environment, probably the last thing they would notice is the water. Dewey is the philosophical water within which government education swims.” And yet again, more: “Dewey was both wiser and more candid than much of today’s public educational establishment. He made no bones about the fact that education required religion and, in his view, the religion required is the religion of humanism. I say he is wiser because, with educators from Aristotle through Secretary of Education William Bennett, he knew that education has most essentially to do with paideia, with the transmission and nurturing of truths by which a community would live. A new religion was needed, he believed, and he called it the religion of humanism.” This gets at the point I was trying to make in my previous posts on secular humanism and the teaching of evolution: teachers should not hide behind professionalism and pretend their pedagogies don’t challenge fundamentalist Christianity, or even, ideally, capitalism.

This then leads me to the intellectual history of secular humanism provided by Hand in his opinion, which was, in essence, an attempt to refute the notion that education should operate in a bias-free vacuum of professionalism—put on display in the trial by John Tyson, Vice-President of the Alabama State Board of Education, as paraphrased by Hand: “values are not something that he thinks should be taught in the schools, but should be taught at home and in the churches. ‘What you go to the public schools for is to be educated to learn how to read and write.’” Instead of this, Hand interpreted the thought of several key people who gave testimony. One such person was Glennelle Halpin, a professor of educational psychology at Auburn who gave a lengthy testimony summarizing the major philosophies that informed educational theory, from behaviorism to humanist psychology. She was a proponent of values clarification, a pedagogical method that conservatives pointed to as representative of the hyper-relativism that informed public school curriculum, though Halpin said it was often misunderstood. Hand summed up her thought process on this: “Dr. Halpin says that the school does not have the right to teach a value system that is different from the parent, but the content of the curriculum in the school is not necessarily based on a survey of the value systems of the parents, so when the teacher does instruct she may well match or mismatch, deliberately, the information about values that has been presented to that child.”

As counter to Halpin’s insider view, Hand relied upon the testimony of famed conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, whose traditionalism informed his many writings on education. Based on Kirk’s analysis, Hand presented a brief but compelling overview of secular humanism’s etymology. The term emerged in the twentieth century, used by humanists in the Dewey vein to separate themselves from new humanists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. For Kirk, as for Babbitt and More, this was the distinction between humanism and “humanitarianism,” the latter being a sickly form of relativism. On whether secular humanism is a religion, Kirk argued that it indeed was, based on the fact that it had a set of documents which formed a creed—the Humanist Manifestos—and because it tended to make immanent “symbols of transcendence.” As Christians claimed “that one enters upon immortality through perfection in grace in death,” secular humanists made immanent “the perfection of society here in this world.” “The equivalent of death to the secularists is passing through a form of revolution to a new order of a perfect kind. The role model for this secularist thinking, Dr. Kirk says, is the Marxist theory: revolution and then eternal changelessness here on earth, a condition of perfect equality.”

My musings here only briefly touch upon the intellectual history of secular humanism synthesized by Judge Hand in the “Alabama Textbook Case.” My argument is neither that this is necessarily good intellectual history, nor that Hand made compelling legal or political arguments (all of which, luckily, were shot down by higher courts). Rather, I find it fascinating that Hand’s opinion reads more like intellectual history. And I maintain that the conservative critique of secular humanism points to some of the weaknesses inherent to the professional cloak worn by contemporary progressive educators and proponents of multiculturalism.