Age of Fracture

by Daniel T. Rodgers

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain.

"Age of Fracture" offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves.

Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, American History, Philosophy, Economics

360 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 21, 2010

Reviews

[Steven Peterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book deals with an important issue: the decline of a sense of community in the United States. The dust jacket says: ". . .Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain." To explain the title of the book, Rodgers notes that (Page 3): ". . .the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture."

Some of the aspects of this fracture that are addressed: the change from a managed economy to a revival of market ideology and, more important, and a withdrawal by government from shaping the economy; the decline of a sense of national identity to more fractured views of identity (including the so-called "culture wars"); the nature of society.

The first full chapter sets the stage, with the title "Losing the Words of the Cold War." Here, the language of the time changes as the Cold War phases out. A key vehicle for exploring this is an examination of presidential oratory, replete with examples from Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, to George W. Bush.

The last chapter seems oddly anticlimactic, referring to the Post 9/11 world. The volume closes with Rodgers noting that (Page 271) "The age of fracture has permanently altered the play of argument and ideas. The pieces would have to be reassembled on different frames, the tensions between self and society resolved anew."

The book is provocative and attempts to reflect upon the differences so play in today's United States of America. We do see fracture around us, by ethnicity, by religion, by ideology, by gender, and so on, across a variety of categories. However, I am not sure that Rodgers ultimately pulls things together to explain "fracture." There is sometimes abstractness to the discussion (despite all the concrete examples) that leaves matters unclear. Still, worth a read on an important subject.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first started reading this book, which I pulled more or less at random off my shelf, I was a little mystified why I had bought it. I thought, from its title, it would be political philosophy, but instead it was intellectual history, of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The book seemed crisp and dispassionate at first, though it quickly revealed itself as somewhat meandering and biased. After a little research, I realized that in 2012 "Age of Fracture" had won the Bancroft Prize, awarded to books of American history. Most people probably haven’t heard of the Bancroft Prize, but it is regarded as very prestigious, so I must have bought this book because it was publicized in that context. But when I finished reading it, the more I thought about it, the more I disliked this book.

Of course, nowadays (it was founded in 1948, so this has not always been true) the Bancroft Prize is only awarded to left-wing books. Recent recipients include the stupid Empire of Cotton and various other books about wrongs done by America, along with a few that seem neutral, such as one on “Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail.” (Maybe I’ll get that one. On second thought, maybe not—it is apparently a shrill screed about how America wronged the oceans. Damn Americans.) To the extent the Bancroft Prize enters the larger public consciousness, it is mostly or exclusively because the prize was, a single time, rescinded. That was after being awarded in 2001 to Michael Bellesiles’s "Arming America." His book was received with great fanfare and huge publicity across all media outlets, including getting cover articles in Time and Newsweek (back when those mattered), because it purported to prove that contrary to the common understanding, but fully comporting with progressive political goals, guns were rare in America until the modern era. Unfortunately for the gun grabbers, Bellesiles fabricated the entirety of his data, in so gross a manner that he was actually fired by Emory University. He’s now a bartender, so I suppose there is some justice in the world. Meanwhile, the Bancroft Prize has apparently trudged on, offering books like "Age of Fracture."

This book is left-wing, too, though in a more muted way. In essence, it is a foreshortened history of ideas in a very specific time and place, with the underlying thesis that, uniquely in American history, this period (roughly 1975 to 2000) represents a deep fracture of American society. By “fracture,” the author, Daniel Rodgers, does not mean social fracture or atomization. In fact, he sneeringly and without argument rejects Robert Putnam’s widely accepted analysis in "Bowling Alone" of social atomization, since confirmed both by further experience and by many other authors across the political spectrum, from Yuval Levin to Cass Sunstein. Rather, Rodgers means the fracture of ideas, not society, into smaller splinters. He thinks American society is doing fine, except for the continued existence of some meanie conservatives. Because he is blinded by the typical left-wing lust for anything that smacks of so-called emancipation, Rodgers is unable to criticize any fragmentation of society if it appears to be emancipatory, whatever its actual effects on society and its members. Thus, throughout the book, he maintains that American associational life has not fractured. Bowling leagues, labor unions, and churches are not necessary or even, really, desirable, since they can be exclusionary, not emancipatory. “In an age of Oprah, MTV, and charismatic religious preaching, the agencies of socialization were different before, but they were not discernably weaker.” That’s the sum of his argument on the matter, and yes, it’s just that stupid. Nor does he so much as mention the internet, Facebook, and so on, which in 2011 were already highly relevant to social atomization. For Rodgers, everything is just awesome, but we have more ideas than we used to. Which is true enough, but it does not answer the key question—are those new ideas dumb?

The answer is “yes.” At the beginning, Rodgers sets out a summary of his thesis, and I cannot do better. “Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle . . . conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.” I should note, though, that one word particularly matters in that summary—“imagined.” Rodgers just loves the word. He applies it constantly, to anything that he disagrees with, as way to discredit without the messy need to actually discuss it or disprove. Thus, American society did not have collectivities, it had “imagined collectivities,” which were, you will not be surprised to learn, merely fronts for repression that was relieved by progressive-led emancipation during the Age of Fracture. Similarly, most of us think “fracture” is generally negative; for Rodgers, it is a mostly virtuous “disaggregation” that leads to emancipation. Which is doubtless why this book, modestly interesting but pedestrian, won the Bancroft Prize.

The book is best at the beginning. Rodgers starts with a fascinating study of Presidential speeches. He notes that Jimmy Carter gave as many speeches in office, about a thousand, as all Presidents did collectively in the entire nineteenth century. He analyzes pre-1980 Presidential speeches, noting that they heavily focused on “responsibility, destiny, justice, morality, and society.” This was especially true when the topic was the Cold War (think Kennedy), but also true across all areas of Presidential attention. We were not promised, and we did not promise ourselves, a free lunch. Rather, we jointly agreed that if we worked together, America could remain great. But Reagan led, or perhaps just personified, a new focus. He channeled a disembodied freedom, not one tied to the community and ordered liberty, the ancient freedom to seek virtue, but one of radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Tom Paine, shorn of the complexity of those thinkers and the challenges they faced, and turned into gauzy aspirations for modern freedoms untied to community and sacrifice. “It was privatized and personalized, bent in on itself in the very enunciation of its limitlessness.” It worked for Reagan, but Rodgers is entirely correct that this was a big change in national ideation. Today’s conservatives who idolize Reagan may not like it, but Reagan himself led, or at least embodied, the modern American rush to liberty without constraint. (Rodgers also notes that Theodore Roosevelt called Paine “a filthy little atheist,” and today’s American conservatives, as some of them increasingly turn against the Enlightenment project of unbridled liberty and the consequent Leviathan state, should probably join Roosevelt’s opinion.)

Thus, the first of Rodger’s fractures is the severe weakening of a political ideal of true collective action—that is, not collectivism understood as government activity, but of true collectivism, individuals choosing to work together for common goals in the American project. In the next chapter, Rodgers extends his fracture analysis to economics. He reviews Keynesianism, monetarism, the Phillips Curve, Ronald Coase, Say’s Law, public utility regulation, Richard Posner (since fallen from grace and become a doddering eccentric) and much else, with his usual focus on ideas and their splintering. He focuses on ideas because for Rodgers, it is ideas that drive society. This conclusion naturally gives primacy of place to generators of ideas, namely intellectuals such as Daniel Rodgers. There’s a little bit too much self-love in this prism for my taste, but Rodgers does a decent job of explicating complicated concepts in this section. His main point is that the theory of economics returned to a focus on the impersonal, unleashed market as being the best mechanism to accomplish all goals, with removal of intrusion by the government or others perceived as necessary to maximize social and individual utility. And thus, “To imagine the market now was to imagine a socially detached array of economic actors, free to choose and optimize, unconstrained by power or inequalities, governed not by their common deliberative action but only by the impersonal laws or the market.” Thus, the exaltation of markets increased fracture of ideas, and helped to dissolve the glue of American society—something we see today, with inequality, class divisions, and the rise of Trump, although as I say Rodgers refuses to see any of this with respect to social atomization and the destruction of intermediary institutions.

Rodgers then delves more deeply into ideas not tied directly to specific political issues or economics, starting with new ideas of power. He notes that prior to the 1960s “interest group power” was regarded as the American political norm, with the American system being designed to allow checks and balances to permit interest groups to interact to create political ends. But in the 1960s, we got Marxism infecting everything. Well, that’s not exactly what Rodgers says—he focuses on theories about the “new classes,” which he ties to Marxist analyses, but not traditional Marxist class analyses. Rather, both left and right began viewing America through new ideas of class. On the left, this consisted of a new emphasis on “hegemony,” originating in the re-discovering of Antonio Gramsci, and of how the power of the hegemonic classes could supposedly be broken, resulting in emancipation for persecuted classes of society, outside of the “workers.” On the right, it consisted of neoconservatives who came to view what is sometimes today called the “clerisy,” a self-perpetuating, ever-expanding group dominating intellectual life and dependent on constant expansion of the size and scope of government, as a pernicious force in American life. This analysis starts off interesting, but quickly deteriorates once Rodgers starts taking cretins like Michel Foucault seriously, and we are told that incomprehensible lectures from "Discipline and Punish" are relevant to America. Relevant they may be, but only because they show that fools will always be fooled, and that the Emperor still has no clothes. Nonetheless, all this does a decent job of showing Rodgers’s thesis of fracture, if for no other reason than that all these ways of viewing power are new and incompatible both with each other and with the traditional American view and practice of political power.

In the next chapter, Rodgers treats race, or rather “race and social memory.” Here, things go a little off the rails. Most of the chapter talks about the African American experience of this era, and while new challenges and arguments arose, this has nothing to do with a new set of fractures, nor does Rodgers really make that claim. After all, the treatment of black Americans is the original fracture of our country, if anything is. Rodgers just seems to think race is important to America, which it is, but it’s not important to his argument. This chapter also has some odd moments. Anita Hill is a conservative? "Black Athena" is anything but risible? It’s only at the end of the chapter that Rodgers touches on the real element of fracture in the American view of race—the explosion in the last quarter of the century in splinter groups claiming a share of emancipation and demanding compensation, in competition with African Americans while trying to form coalitions with each other and with black Americans, trying to divide the pie into more pieces while somehow believing the pie magically increases in overall size. This process is apparently what is meant by “social memory,” which appears to be a new buzzword for alleging how groups that are totally different with totally different histories can be fooled, or fool themselves, into thinking they have a common history, and therefore common interests, based on selectively focusing on ideologically advantageous past happenings. Certainly this rash of new identities, mostly fictional with fictional histories, which has today ended in the miasma of identity politics choking the Democratic Party, is a type of fracture, but this gets only two pages, when it should get the whole chapter.

The chapter “Gender and Certainty” then treats us, if that is the word, to the entire spectrum of feminist “thought” of this era. None of this rates any respect or attention, other than to note that Rodgers is entirely right that it created disaggregation, not least among American women, the vast majority of whom did not and do not regard themselves as represented by the likes of the late Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin (similarly late and unlamented), Bell Hooks (who purports to spell her fake name lowercase, which I will not do, since name capitalization is a universal convention, not a choice by the named individual), and so forth. Rodgers does his best to make the tripe of these authors seem presentable, but he fails. On the other hand, he does present a good analysis of the internal conflicts among so-called feminists, as well as between them and mainstream American women. We are also treated to sidebars on Derrida and Lacan, which are not enjoyable, and we end with an attack on Allan Bloom, who, as with all conservative thinkers in this book, is on the surface addressed, but snidely dismissed without engaging with his ideas, usually with some personal attack (here, “an atheist and aesthete, a closeted homosexual”).

Grinding onwards, we get a lengthy paean to the grossly overrated John Rawls, as well as a description of his conflict with the radical libertarian Robert Nozick. Rodgers’s purpose is to draw attention to fresh splits among the ideas of political philosophers, including not only Rawls and Nozick, but also Michael Walzer and Burkean conservatives. The point of this chapter (“The Little Platoons of Society”) is to try to ridicule and dismiss conservatives through a superficially neutral analysis. At this point, the book begins to dissolve into a morass, touching on everything from (illegal) campus speech codes (allegedly “designed to preserve an open commons of ideas from those who shouted and intimidated”—ha ha), to conservatives who “imagined [that word again] that university faculties had fallen into the hands of ideological enemies”, to Charles Murray’s analysis of lower class struggles in "Losing Ground" (denigrated as “tendentious” and “slipshod,” though as always with no argument, citation or evidence of that being so). Since the chapter is propaganda, not analysis, Rodgers proves completely unable to keep any line of thought together, making it worthless.

Throughout the book Rodgers not infrequently betrays a complete lack of understanding of the conservative political ecosystem. He repeatedly insists that conservatives have an enormous, powerful, and wealthy network of foundations, institutes, and so forth, which train young conservatives, fund conservative ideas, push conservative positions, and are the equal, if not the superior, of gigantic left-wing institutions, such as the Ford Foundation. This is just ludicrous—there is no such conservative infrastructure. The only relevant such conservative entity, the Heritage Foundation, as of 2015 had revenue of $92 million and assets of $270 million (according to ProPublica). In the same year, the Ford Foundation had revenue of $658 million and assets of $12.4 billion. And the Ford Foundation is only one of scores of wealthy leftist agitprop groups, not to mention allied entities, such as the entirety of the news-setting media and academia, all of which work in active coordination to aggressively force left-wing interests onto every part of society. Rodgers further beclowns himself by making facially implausible and demonstrably false claims, for example that “The public-interest litigation networks that had been critically important players in the left-liberal quest for justice began to be matched by an equally powerful phalanx of public-interest litigation organizations on the right engaged in the same task of translating grievances into justiciable language to catch the ear of activist judges.” This is the purest fantasy on every level—he are no such right-wing organizations; and there has been no attempt, much less success, by conservatives, to read their political positions into law by activist judges, who simply do not exist on the right in the same way as they exist on the left. (They should, and they need to, but that is another discussion.) Ruling by judicial fiat is a solely leftist tool, and has been for a hundred years. And note, again, the subtle left-wing twist Rodgers adds—leftists “quest for justice,” conservatives push “grievances.”

Rodgers continues this line of attack with criticism of originalism as a method of Constitutional interpretation. He clearly understands almost nothing of this area, but that doesn’t stop him from making wild claims, such as that originalism “reimagined the Constitution” (that word again!) He wonders endlessly why originalism became a formal method of interpretation in this era, making no appearance before then, apparently unable to grasp the simple truth that prior to this era it would have been regarded as unnecessary to debate the need to tie the Constitution to its text and history, since nobody had tried to wrench the Constitution wholly from its moorings and turn it into a tool of left-wing domination by entirely ignoring both text and history, in order to create rights such as the “right” to abortion out of whole cloth, under the aegis of, but without any actual tie to, the Constitution. Originalism was, and is, a response to this distortion, in the same way that certain antiviral drugs were created in response to AIDS, not needed before the plague came upon us.

Finally, Rodgers tacks on a coda about 9/11, noting that “Crisis events rattle, even if only momentarily, an intellectual culture’s certainties. They bring into focus some of the alternatives running below the surface. They hold suspended in the air, for a moment, some of that intellectual culture’s multiple possibilities.” I entirely agree that this is true of crises, and I intend to explore elsewhere how this can best be turned to my, and our, advantage. But note, again, the crippling disability Rodgers imposes on his analysis by only always and ever viewing “intellectual culture” as the only important part of society. This is the prime error of "Age of Fracture"—it begins with the premise that ideas are important, and immediately morphs that into the premise that ideas are everything. For Rodgers, ideas precede and supersede the actual people that make up actual socities. But the truth is that ideas are only part of a society and an era, and while they may drive some times more than others, to the extent they diverge from reality, reality will always reassert itself, as the arc of Communism proved. In a similar manner, the arc of modern progressivism, for all its talk of breaking hegemony and being on the right side of history, is certain to end not in a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but in the landfill. The question, though, is what will replace it? From this perspective, fracture is merely the symptom of oncoming change, and while I suppose Rodgers does an adequate job of laying out, if not an adequate job of analyzing, some recent lines of fracture, at the end of the day reading this book is mostly a waste of time. My time, more specifically.

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential work of twenteith-century history. I read this alongside Sophia Rosenfeld's The Age of Choice and it's a fine pairing. I came away appreciating Rosenfeld's deep history, but feeling that Rodgers comes closer to the full picture of the changes that swept American life in the post-Cold War era. Devoting chapters to political rhetoric, economics, political theory, race, gender and law, he demonstrates how logics grounded in a highly circumscribed theory of rational action and a linked view of market economics have made it almost impossible to think coherently in the broader public sphere about shared responsibility and sacrifice. I'd read it alongside Rosenfeld's chapter on The Sciences of Choice, which expands Rodgers's vision without contradicting it.

I did find the epilog on 9/11 unconvincing. I assume that's because Rodgers and the world hadn't even really begun to process the implications, but also because the full impact of the digital nightmare had only begun to be felt.

Highly deserving of the Bancroft Prize it won.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 4 out of 5]

20. yy'ın sonunda sosyal bilimlerdeki düşünce değişikliğini öyküleştiren Amerika merkezli bir "çağın ruhu" çalışması. Ekonominin ve siyasal iktidarın anlaşılma biçimlerindeki değişimi anlatan ikinci ve üçüncü bölümler altın; feminist düşüncedeki ayrışmayı anlatan bölüm gümüş.

Geri kalan kısımlar Amerikalı olmayan okur için ilgisiz ve sıkıcı kalıyor. Bir de yeteri kadar sosyal bilim okumuş, üniversitede 20. yy sosyal bilimine dair tartışmalara maruz kalmışsanız burada anlatılanlar bir şekilde kendiliğinden beyninize işlemiş oluyor. Fakat tekrardan zarar gelmez.

En

A US-centered essay on the zeitgeist of the late-20th century social sciences. The two parts about the evolution of the economic and political thinking are gold; the part about the fracturing of the feminist thought is bronze. The rest is somewhat boring for the non-American reader. And as one other reviewer pointed out, you do not learn something new if you are already familiar with the late-20th century debates about the general trends in social sciences. Repetition is key to learning though.

[Pete Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a tremendous book. This is a must-read for anyone who is interested in a quite comprehensive intellectual history of the past 40 years. I'm one year into my reading project to answer "what the heck happened?" -- what, in the last half century, has led to our current American political malaise -- and this book has been one of the most useful in my pursuit of an answer.

[Ldrutman Drutman · Rating 5 out of 5]

he Princeton Historian Daniel T. Rodgers has written a fascinating new book about how the U.S. has gone from being one big beacon of light to a thousand little points. The title gives it away. We are in an Age of Fracture. We’ve gone from shared sacrifice and shared identities to individual expression and diffuse identities. We’ve gone from limits to dreams; we’ve shed the confines of the past for the endless possibilities of future reinvention. The only problem is, it’s starting to look like we might now want the past back after all, and limits are starting to look more prudent.

The story begins in the Cold War, an era of asking what you could do for your country. History and tradition weighed heavily; big institutions dominated. “Dedication, courage, responsibility, self-scrutiny and sacrifice,” writes Rodgers, “these were the nouns that bore the burden of the Cold War presidential rhetoric.”

But by the time sunny Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the confining rhetoric of the Cold War was gone and “terms like ‘crisis,’ ‘peril’ and sacrifice slipped one by one out of Reagan’s major speeches like dried winter leaves.” (What can he say? The man likes his collections of representative words.) In Reagan’s speeches, the historian detects the new optimism of self-actualizing philosophy, and the (re?)-birth of an American faith that from three simple words – “We, The People” – anything was possible.

But Reagan may just be the transition’s most visible mouthpiece. The shift away from institutions to individuals was just as much the rage among intellectuals. First, most visibly, in economics: In the 1960s, Keynesian economics was the consensus view, with its focus on institutions and macro-level supply and demand. But then it proved unable to either explain or solve the stagflation of the 1970s, leading Daniel Bell to proclaim that, “nobody has any answers he is confident of.”

Enter the new microeconomics: the atomized market of millions of socially-detached, utility-maximizing individuals, owing nothing to society other than to make themselves happy. “In its very simplifications,” writes Rodgers “it filled a yearning for clarity that the older, more complex pictures of society could not.”

Like Reagan’s soaring rhetoric, the new faith in markets was a way to break free of limits. In contrast to the gray pessimism of planners and government bureaucrats who wanted people to live within their means, the new models bespoke a land of heroic entrepreneurs and innovators, of an America that could re-invent itself constantly from the bottom up.

Other social sciences tracked the trends in economics. In political science, models of rational choice, with their focus on individual utility, replaced the importance of larger institutional structures and forces. Everything now could be explained by examining the incentives of individuals as if they were independent from larger social institutions. Phrases like the “will of the people” became meaningless when complex models showed how impossible it actually was to usefully aggregate independent preferences.

In sociology, the guiding concept of power “grew less tangible, less material, more pervasive, more elusive, until, in some widespread readings of power, it became all but impossible to trace down.” Michel Foucault found power everywhere, and by doing so, effectively rendered it meaningless – for if it was everywhere, than who could pin it down? In anthropology, Clifford Geertz found “nothing but a play of texts.” Everything was performance and masks.

In more popular books, Alvin Toffler’s widely-read Future Shock proclaimed “The death of permanence.” John Naisbitt’s Megatrends promised the triumph of the individual in the new information age.

The politics of race and gender were likewise affected. On the subject of race, conservatives embraced the notion of a color-blind society, and race as a social construct. “In the ‘color-blind’ society project,” writes Rodgers. “Amnesia was a conscious strategy, undertaken in the conviction that the present’s dues to the past had already been fully paid.” Again, the same theme: the triumph of individualism came at the expense of the past. One could not have a world of endless new opportunities if one got bogged down with worries about history and obligations.

On gender, the breakdown was internal to the movement. A representative 1977 woman’s gathering in Houston fell apart when it became apparent there was no single woman’s experience everyone could agree on. The feminist scholar Judith Butler concluded in her landmark book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity: “There were only scripts, nothing outside or beyond them.” Postmodernism strikes again. If everything is socially constructed, nothing has a foundation.

“Choice, provisionality, and impermanence,” writes Rodgers. “A sense of the diffuse and penetrating, yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history – these were the emergent intellectual themes of the age.”

And yet by the late 1980s, one could also detect a backlash. In the academy, Allan Bloom railed against the nihilistic deconstruction of everything in The Closing of the American Mind. Conservative think tanks began looking to local communities as sources of civic republicanism. Evangelicals saw the church as the center that could and must hold.

“Conservative intellectuals by the end of the 1980s still yearned for a common culture,” wrote Rodgers. “They could half-remember and half-invent in their mind’s eye a more consensual age, when terms like ‘civil religion’ and the ‘American creed’ had been sociological commonplaces.”

But the great irony was that the new conservative embrace of the American tradition was itself a creative reinvention –a mythic golden age that only selectively drew on actual history.

In conservative legal scholarship, Rodgers writes: “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. Originalism’s appeal to the past was, like the economists’ modelings of time, profoundly ahistorical.”

As a document of intellectual history, Rodgers’ book is brilliant. Learned, wide-ranging, delightful to read, full of keen little insights (and epoch-defining bundles of nouns.) But it leaves open the question: is the fracture permanent? “One might reach nostalgically for a fragment of the past,” Rodgers concludes. “But the time that dominated late-twentieth-century social thought was now.”

One way to view politics is about the tension between the individual and the group. All the great political trade-offs – liberty vs. security, equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome – are at root conflicts between the desires of individuals to do as they please and attempts by the group to keep individuals from doing so much of what they please that the group falls apart. Such a view takes history as civilizations as bouncing back and forth between the two poles: give people too little room for individual self-expression, and they’ll demand to be free. But give them too much room to do whatever they like and be whatever they want, and they’ll demand more order and group identity.

Rodgers leaves us at the moment in which a hunger for a rootedness in history seems to be growing. Have we gone as far as individualism will take us? And if so, what takes us back? Here’s a hypothesis: do the new social networking tools that increasingly dominate our lives restore the possibility of a new and different kind of collective identity? And am I the only one wondering this? Maybe I’d better post this review to Facebook, and see what other people think…

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant.

Daniel T. Rodgers takes on a very difficult task--writing about the very recent past from a historical perspective--and does so really well. He is able to step outside the current ways of thinking--our controlling metaphors--and show how they came into being, what they illuminate and what they make difficult to see. The book touches upon social history, sociology, political history, and public policy--he's dealing with on-going debates, so it's had to divvy these subjects up--but this is primarily an intellectual history. And yet it often reads as good as narrative history. Really, really well done.

Rodgers begins with what are essentially two introductory chapters, the first outlining his argument, the next giving it concrete form.

He argues that in the mid-20th century, the controlling ideas were about conformity and system. There was a rich--thick, lived--idea of community of responsibility of nation and work. This was not necessarily a better way of thinking about the world--after all, these ideas were used to justify apartheid int he American South and institutionalized misogyny, as well as other evils--but it was the way it was. There was a civic religion based around shared symbols, such that even dissenters--such as Martin Lither King, Jr.--still paid homage to them.

In the early and mid-1970s, this shared vision started to change, and what emerged was a sense of society as thin, of responsibilities as non-existent, of interactions as driven by markets, of social identity fragmented and intersectional.

The second chapter charts some of these changes through the political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan--not necessarily with him as a shaper of the changes, but as an example of the trend. Presidential rhetoric itself was relatively new, with Reagan giving as many speeches in his presidency as all the presidents of the nineteenth century combined. Reagan's language owed something to what came before, but where all presidential rhetoric since the end of World War II addressed the Cold War as both a chance for freedom to grow as well as a responsibility for the nation to carry, Reagan and his speechwriters downplayed responsibilities. History was not a constraint, but a river--a story--giving birth to the present time in which all one should do was--in the words of Joseph Campbell, who doesn't get mentioned in the book, but should--is follow one's bliss.

As my conjoining of Campbell and Reagan suggests--and as Rodger's argument implies--tis change wasn't necessarily driven by either the left or the right, but both, in some ways, though the changes had varying effects on the different partisans. (He does not acknowledge, but seems to assume, that the last quarter of the 20th century is a profoundly conservative moment, even as the meaning of conservatism has changed drastically over the last three decades.)

He then goes on to show the fracturing of social mores in a host of different arenas.

First is the rise rise of micro-economics and the change of economics to a focus on the so-called market. In the past, economics had been about a system for organizing labor, capital, and technology. But now it is mostly about considering individual choices within a so-called perfect market. Rodgers pegs the change to the inflation of the 1970s, which defied explanation by the then-reigning Keynesian economics. This opened a wedge for theorists--primarily associated with the University of Chicago--to offer a different view of economics based on individual choice and markets. The initial studies, for the most part, were hedged with qualifiers, but as they were taken up, by both conservative and liberal intellectuals, these caveats were ignored, until market-thinking became the dominant explanation for all manner of social behaviors--and indeed the very notion of social seemed unnecessary.

Rodgers then moves on to how notions of power changed--from something that one possessed and used to something that was all around, and likely unchangeable. Foucault, of course, is a prominent part of this change, but there were other theorists working along the same line, including Clifford Geertz and futurists.

The next two chapters are probably the weakest--though still provoking. They deal with notions of race and gender, and discuss how the rise of debates over diversity, intersectionality, and individuality made these categories problematic, which in turn made unified political action difficult. Rodgers hits most of the main highlights here, but the chapters don't cohere as well and the narrative structure of them is hard to find, making them seem more a compendium or chronicle than an explanation.

The last two chapters are the most creative, addressing material that is not often--if you were involved with higher education in the 1990s or 2000s, you have a sketchy understanding of some of the above debates, but the last two chapters touch on material I haven't seen discussed before in this context.

The first deals with political theory, including the unexpected rise of libertarianism, which was more influential than its numbers would suggest. He again compares current (and developing) notions with those of the mid-20th century, when America was seen as a unified nation made up of competing interest groups. As well, there was the idea--capped by Rawls--that society should be just. Libertarians argued that he outcome of social processes did not matter so much--it was the means, not the ends, and as long as the means were just and made without coercion, the system worked.Liberals and conservatives, to varying extents. opposed this notion, which dissolved the very notion of society. Leftists argued for smaller communities, in which individuals had responsibilities to each other. Conservatives were often offended by libertarians' dismissal of tradition and so ended up in the same intellectual place as many individuals, arguing for small communities--something more than the individual, but less than the family--although over time libertarian thought did influence conservatives more and more.

Finally, Rodgers looks at the notion of time, and how it too has been folded and made small in the last quarter century. Debates over multiculturalism and the inclusion of forgotten groups into the story of America made it nearly impossible to write a synthetic narrative history of America, and so history itself was fragmented. At the same time, postmodernism and originalism dissolved notions of time from different ends of the political spectrum, with postmodernism arguing that objects from all different eras could be combined, and constitutional originalists arguing it was possible to erase the gaps between 18th century politicians and today. (That's an example of Rodgers' creativity, pitting postmodernists against jurists like Antonin Scalia.) And then there was the fall of communism--the so-called 'end of history--and the attempts to bring the rebuild the formerly communist countries. Basing their ideas on the prominence of the market--ignoring history and tradition and politics--the engineers of this change insisted that the countries should be switched over immediately and quickly, with no gradual change: time should play no role.

A coda brings the story of 9-11. Rodgers notes that for a time, the older values were again put into service; there was talk of obligation, the weight of history, the importance of nations, the need to sacrifice. But this talk waned within a decade--although not completely. What he sees going on now is a renegotiation, a way of blending the two discourses. It remains to be seen wether one will win, or the other, or some third thing yet come to be.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel T. Rodgers, analyzing what most Marxists and radicals would instead label the beginning of the neoliberal era, coined the term the Age of Fracture. In Rodgers’s view, “what characterized the Age of Fracture was not a literal thinning out of associational life…social structures persisted. What changed were the ideas and metaphors capable of holding focus the aggregate of human life as opposed to its smaller, fluid, individual ones” (6). Rather than examining the economic turn to neoliberalism in the United States from the dying grasp of the New Deal coalition, Rodgers examines the intellectual and rhetorical shift which legitimized this shift in the public political consciousness, beyond the general mystification of “realignment.”

Rodgers begins with the Carter presidency, noting that the “modern talking presidency” was largely a post-WWII development. Whereas Abraham Lincoln only gave 78 speeches, Franklin Roosevelt gave 300. Whereas FDR gave only 300, Jimmy Carter gave almost a thousand (15). Although they cannot make American politics, “presidential speeches…shape the public words of the day. They set into circulation mental pictures of society and its field of obligations. They articulate the nation and its promises” (16). Carter’s language was “markedly different [from his predecessors]...[he gave a] low-church image of the presidency, the congregation [holding] the nation’s moral force; the president was the people’s temporary representative” (20). Although his diplomatic rhetoric was relatively dovish, Carter shifted the use of Cold War duties of self-scrutiny and sacrifice into domestic politics as the Energy Crisis set in (21). Reagan and his speechwriters used this to their advantage, “losing the words of the Cold War” and appropriating psychological self-help rhetoric to cast Carter as an un-American pessimist. Reagan’s popularity, even when compared to the Carter presidency, was actually unremarkable, but produced in a personal manner exceptional to presidents before him. “The theme that soared in Reagan’s rhetoric was that of the ultimate state of boundlessness, dreaming,” in stark contrast to Carter (24-33). Reagan transformed the rhetorical landscape of the Cold War into one where the American “people” were disaggregated and individualized, every one exceptional and no one responsible for anything but themselves (36-38).

The evolution of political rhetoric was mirrored by economic intellectuals in the shift from the focus on production in classical economics to consumption among the marginalists of the 1890s to 1950s to the glorification of wealth and the market itself by the 1970s (44-47). As the Philips Curve proved unable to face the stagflation crisis, Miltonian monetarism had a brief heyday among the Reagan and Thatcher governments until it too proved unworkable (50-56). Instead, there were three longer-lasting “transformations” which solidified neoliberal economic thinking: the “infusion of market models into the law,” in the form of the Coase Theorem and airline deregulation; the shift in academic economics from macro to microeconomics, influenced by the Lucas Critique and the vanishing of social aggregates; and the rise of “supply-side” populists, totally aloof of academic economics but influential in conservative journalism and among policymakers (56-76).

Political and economic developments went hand-in-hand with another revolution in intellectual framing: the question of “power.” It was during the 1970s that “new class theory” had its heyday, embraced both by the dissident New Left sympathetic to Yugoslavia or Trotskyist theory, and the political right, often influenced by Old Left figures turned neoconservative like the former Trotskyists James Burnham and Irving Kristol. The right in particular embraced new class theory as a weapon against knowledge workers, alleging that anti-capitalist liberals hostile to capitalism controlled the organs of American bureaucracy (82-85). In this period, political game theory in the form of the prisoner’s dilemma, the free rider problem, and the tragedy of the commons were popularized as right-wing hypothetical counters to non-conservative thought (85-87). On the left, the turn was towards culture, influenced by E. P. Thompson’s consciousness-first view of class and English translations of Gramsci turning cultural hegemony into the main subject of Marxian analysis (90-98). Influenced by this preoccupation and the incoming works of Michel Foucualt into English, the vaunted “cultural turn” began under the influence of linguistic structuralism and symbolic anthropology. Although Foucault eventually deified power into something that “was everywhere,” the preoccupation with cultural and power remained (98-107). More popularly, works like Alvin Toffler’s 1970 Future Shock came to prominence in predicting the breakdown of the concept of “permanence” itself (107-109).

Even the concept of race, once a key aspect of activism in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, underwent significant challenge in the 1970s. The radical sociologist William Julius Wilson, in his The Declining Significance of Race brought concepts of race in sociology into chaos with his assertion of structural issues within the capitalist mode of production that cleaved the black middle class from a black “underclass.” While the black middle class had won its place in society through the Civil Rights movement, they left behind an underclass which had not been uplifted and was rapidly being abandoned not only by the government or white society, but their erstwhile racial allies (112-125). In backlash against affirmative action, whites began asserting an immigrant form of ethnic nationalism while right “intellectuals” like Dinesh D’Souza pushed a cultural racism which privileged Western epistemology and cultural experience over all else (125-130). With the destruction of affirmative action after Nixon left office, race itself was thrown into doubt as black and progressive intellectuals began to recognize that race was “socially constructed, strategic, and intersectional” (137-142). As critical theories of race abounded, so too did theory of gender, which found itself much more front and center in mainstream political battles. Indeed, Rodgers concludes that the culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s were “a battle over women’s acts and women’s and men’s natures” (145). The feminist movement, marred by theoretical and political division among race and ethnicity, as well as controversies over the politics of sexual desire, pornography, and sex work fragmented into many identities and labels (152). The newest intellectual direction of feminism in feminist deconstruction, inspired by poststructuralism and critical legal studies, pursued studies of the gendered structure of language (156-164). [Accompanying this passage is the simplest explanation of postmodernism as found in the works of Jameson and Harvey vs. the poststructuralism of Derrida and others]. In response to feminist thought and the advent of Roe v. Wade, conservative counterfeminist movements abounded with the support of a fracturing Catholicism (between its social nature and the fracturing political landscape) and an increasingly politicized evangelical Protestantism (164-171). In the midst of all this was the work of Alan Bloom and Richard Rorty, Bloom’s work an anti-nihilist fight against poststructuralism embraced by the right and Rorty’s work as a left-liberal response (174-179).

Rodgers then devotes some space to analyzing the political-ethical work of John Rawls, whose work rapidly began outdated even as it was being written and published. His idea of the public good, ignoring the built histories of community, could offer “no philosophical support” to the War on Poverty, while the Age of Fracture had no use for such social theories of justice (182-185). Liberation theology, new libertarianism under the tutelage of Robert Nozick, the left-Rawlsian civic republicanism of Michael Walzer, and the conservative “civil society movement” inspired by Eastern European velvet revolutions all provided more compelling alternatives to Rawls’s vision, with the civil society movement gaining the most actual political traction (185-198). With the advent of conservatism, the “Great U-Turn” anti-welfarism became mainstream and interlocked itself with battles over multiculturalism and public/charter school debates which rage to the present (194-219). Finally, the last great battle of the Age of Fracture before the end of the Cold War occurred in the terrains of education and judicial interpretation. Battles raged over the nature of teaching history in the U.S., with conservatives seeking history as an “integrative” engine of patriotism which sacrificed accuracy for conformism (225-229). Throughout the 1980s, legal intellectual fights occurred over originalism and the perceived constitutionality of Brown. Originalism, inherently intellectually contradictory within itself, found advocates in the conservative Robert Bork and the liberal Raoul Berger, while Judge Brehard-Hand’s pro-religious establishment decision in the Wallace v. Jaffree case, which blasted secular humanism as un-originalist, betrayed the ideological nature of originalism itself (232-242).

Rodgers ends his work with an examination of Francis Fukuyama and the “End of History,” demonstrating the realities of shock therapy and the end of the Cold War as contradictory to Fukuyama’s own claims (242-255). Analyzing 9/11, Rodgers sees an initial defracturization of American society in its response (although in a “privatized” manner), appealing to a “culture of obligation,” but this was dead on arrival by the beginning of Bush’s second term and proved un-impactful and ignorant of the racial and supremacist aspects of the War on Terror itself.

Rodgers’s work is good, but I find his focus on the “fragmentation” or “disaggregation” somewhat frustrating. He seeks intellectual history, I know, and disentangled from Marxist theories of neoliberalism like that found in the works of David Harvey, etc., but it seems like Rodgers intentionally sidesteps any mention of neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus as to leave a glaring hole in the history he writes.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

The irony of The Age of Fracture is that it triumphs at asserting a style of historical scholarship that should not thrive in this age: a synthesis, in the style of Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, or Christopher Lasch, that links ideas, politics and social change in an unabashedly essayistic style. And it's true that succeeding at this style is rare in an, um, age of fracture. But Rodgers produces a first draft of recent American history that every subsequent historian must address.

The argument, in short, is that the United States has shifted since the 1950s from big to small, not left to right as commonly misunderstood. In the postwar years, intellectuals, politicians and entrepreneurs focused on power and society, large if amorphous concepts, but more importantly concepts that forced questions about what unifies large groups of people and nation-states. Over time, the focus on large ideas and institutions was supplanted by the small: conservatism, certainly, but also the shifting interest in academia toward everyday life, identity and perspective. This is not intrinsically bad, Rodgers points out. But it has consequences for the decline of the liberal nation-state and the idea of nation itself, which affects how our public sphere functions (or doesn't). Like Hofstadter, Bell and Lasch, the book is unapologetically written to understand the present and the past. It's not easy reading, certainly. It helps to recognize John Rawls and William Julius Wilson, Judith Butler and Robert Nozick. But in another way, those who don't know those names might be best served to read this book. Because even if you are skeptical of Rodgers' conclusions, there is no doubt that he has written a sorely-needed, engaging intellectual history of the modern United States. It's an essential read for American historians and anyone who wants to understand the intellectual and political climate today.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really well-crafted intellectual and cultural history of late twentieth-century America (1975-2000). Rodgers traces the fracturing of the big concepts and metaphors that were key to political rhetoric and social analysis. Talk of national commitments and obligations gave way to individual choices and smaller communal identities, the science of macroeconomic planning lost out to microeconomic models of individual choice, race and gender became harder to define, and power became more difficult to explain. Some thinkers replaced a consciousness of the long processes of history with the hopes of bringing the past immediately to the present or taking a quick route to the future.

Rodgers builds his argument through topical chapters that also have impressive interconnections, giving at least the impression that he has mastered the key ideas in each field (I will certainly defer to experts in these areas). One of the key achievements is showing how these trends affected thinkers across the political spectrum: the characters in his narratives include second- and third-wave feminists, conservative evangelical Christians, the American Catholic bishops, dueling legal thinkers, neoconservatives, and neoliberal economists. We also see how school vouchers and constitutional originalism were advanced by left-of-center thinkers before becoming mainstays of conservative thought.

Rodgers' epilogue looks at the revival of the rhetoric of national purpose after 9/11. Yet it no longer had the deep mid-twentieth-century foundations in a culture shaped by the trends of fragmentation.

One doesn't have to fully buy into the big models and concepts of the mid-twentieth century to be edified by Rodgers' exploration of their transformation. Read it along with Yuval Levin's more popular, pragmatic, and conservative The Fractured Republic.

[Sohum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like other intellectual histories, this book allows historical actors to drop out and for ideas' development and distribution to become underdetermined in order to produce oversimplified narratives (something Rodgers calls out several times in discussing the assumptions of monetarism and other post-70 economics schools). Additionally, while the writing felt exceptional at the beginning, certain repetitive tics made the writing feel a bit rote.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rodgers' book traces the intellectual history of fracturing that he shows dominated post-World War II thought. He shows how metaphors came to replace intellectual inquiry & how the economic crisis of the 1970s allowed market ideologies to move out of economic departments to become metaphors for explaining society from the 1980s onward.

"It's a war of ideas' was a particularly prominent slogan among conservatives. It may not be with rockets and missiles, but it is a war nevertheless,' Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of new right politics sounded the call to arms in the late 1970s. 'It is a war of ideology, it's a war of ideas. It's a war about our way of life. And it has to be fought with the same intensity, I think, and dedication as you would fight a shooting war."1

"What was the nation itself, Bill Clinton asked a Georgetown University audience in 1995 but 'an idea'? Not a product of experiment and social experience, as a common phrase from the 1950s had had it: not the amalgam of habits and institutions that was said to constitute the 'American way' in another prominent Cold War expression. 'America is an idea,' Clinton insisted. 'This country is an idea.'
Those multisided battles and their consequences are the subject of this book. It is history of the ways in which understandings of identity, society, economy, nation, and time were argued out in the last decades of the century, and how those struggles of books and mind changed the ways in which social reality itself would be imagined. It is not a story that falls into neat left-right camps that the partisans of the 'war of ideas' slogan imagined." 2

"But then in the last quarter of the century, through more and more domains of social thought and argument, the terms that had once dominated post-World War II intellectual life began to fracture. One heard less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice. The importance of economic institutions gave way to notions of flexible and instantly acting markets." 5

"What crossed between these widely flung fronts of thought and argument was not a single, dominant idea-postmodern, new right, or neoliberal-but a contagion of metaphors. Intellectual models slipped across the normal divisions of intellectual life. Market ideas moved out of economics departments to become the new standard of current of the social science. Certain game theory set-pieces-the free-rider problem, the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons-because fixture of common sense." 10

"Thomas Jefferson's rule that presidents should communicate to Con press only in writing remained the norm until Woodrow Wilson broke it in 1913." 15

"The freedom which hung so urgently in the balance in the 1950s and 1960s America was ballasted by and contained within its complements: responsibility, destiny, justice, morality and society." 17

"The key to that grammar in the post-1945 years was an urgent sense of history's demands. To talk in the presidential voice was to talk against a backdrop of crisis, danger, and trail." 18

"As watchman on the walls of the republic, the president awakened the citizenry from its narrow contentments. As preacher, he called his nation to its better self, prescribed obligations, enunciated its resolve, and blessed its endeavour." 19

"Ronald Reagan knew those formula intimately. He was virtually the last American president of the Cold War and the one whose career had been most shaped by its massive impress on politics and culture....He was more the nagging Jeremiah than he was Kennedy's trumpet-sounding Joshua." 22

"It [markets] stood for a way of thinking about society with a myriad of self-generated actions for its engine and optimization as its natural and spontaneous outcome." 41

"The puzzle of the age is not that economic concepts moved into the centre of social debate: the riddle is that so abstract and idealized an idea of efficient market action should have arisen amid so much real-world market imperfection." 43

"For Smith, and his successors, the focus of economic science was on the production, not the exchange, of wealth." 44

"By the end of the 1970s, a new idea of the market, cut free from the institutional and sociological relationships constitutive of earlier economic analysis-from Ricardo's great economic 'classes,' from Marshall's tangibly imagined Manchester cotton exchange, from Samuelson's government macroeconomic stablizers-was being called on to do unprecedented amounts of thinking." 47

"The economic crisis of the 1970s was, in short, not merely a crisis in management. It was also, and at least as painfully, a crisis in ideas and intellectual authority." 49

"Friedman was a libertarian, unfailingly confident of the processes of society once they were released from government control, and an ingenious promoter of the abilities of markets to revolve questions of social choice." 51

"These intellectual shifts in the law were the product of several sources. One was the growing hold of the distinctive antitrust doctrine that had been taught at the University of Chicago since the early 1950s, and that emphasized price and efficiency-rather than firm size of market share, as an antitrust doctrine since the 1930s had it-as the market's unambiguous register of monopoly control. Bigness itself worked no economic injury if it were the product of naturally created efficiencies, those schooled in the University of Chicago antitrust doctrine argues." 56

"The most striking change on the institutional landscape that Galbraith had surveyed was the movement of power from the megacorporations-the tightly integrated, market-dominating institutions that Galbraith had anatomized in The New Industrial State-to investment capital." 80

"Multiplicity made democracy work: a field of competition so crowded, and the polity's site of authority so multiple, that no single interest or interlocking set of interests, no power elite or ruling class, was capable of monopolizing it." 82

"But there was more than mere displacement in the vogue of new class analysis on the right. The subjects at the theory's centre were no longer the corporate managers of Burnham's early formulations. What conservative new class theorists put in their place was modern society's still larger array of knowledge and symbolic workers: professionals, educators, cultural producers, and technocrats." 83

"What gave an new analytical frame to the idea of the powers of culture in the early 1970s was the publication of extracts from the prison notebooks of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, hitherto almost entirely unknown in English. Written in fragments between 1929 and 1933 in language coded enough to circumvent the scrutiny of Mussolini's jailers their concern was to release Marxism from the weight of its materialist and historical determinism, to reimagine society as in a state of continuous struggle between its hegemonic and emergent historical block, in which the organization of self-directed labor institutions and critical consciousness were key to the working class's successful seizure of power." 95

"The dominant language of power on the intellectual right was straight-forward and economistic: on the left, where simple notions of base and superstructure might have been expected, the language if power had over the course of a decade and a half become less distinct and material, more vested in culture and consciousness, more contradictory and pessimistic." 98

"On on principal libertarians and conservatives agreed: that equality was a fatal ambition for a just society. 'The passion for equality...is always dangerous to liberty because it is a passion for power: the power to impose one's idea of justice-as-equality on other people,' the neoconservative Irving Kristol hammered home the argument throughout the 1970s." 189

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Age of Fracture" covers the history of ideas in the United States during the last quarter of the 20th century. Daniel T. Rodgers discusses how thought and theories affecting large topics such as economics, race, gender, language and power rapidly shifted, were rearranged and fell out of favour. The book reminds me of a larger scale version of George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment," where Marsden summarizes the major thinkers and books that shaped and informed the 1950s. Rodgers largely does the same, discussing, for instance, Clifford Geertz's symbolic anthropology, Milton Friedman's advocacy of monetarism, etc...but across the longer span of time. Some of the chapters were duds (I found the economic history chapter a bore) while some were more interesting (especially the chapter entitled "Gender and Certainty"). Rodgers' analysis of presidential speeches suggests that presidents often took on the tone of a preacher, sermonizing to the nation, their congregation. The most ironic twist was found in the chapter on race; the left had deemed the racism and marginalization of ethnic minorities wrong and thus requiring policies to support these minorities, most notably, affirmative action. Conservatives eventually adopted the same posture of the left in terms of lamenting marginalization based upon skin colour but they responded that it would be just as erroneous to therefore FAVOUR individuals for promotion or advantage based upon their skin colour. Instead, conservatives stressed that character should decide a person's advancement. Another interesting point Rodgers makes is about the US Constitution. The two sides who debated how to interpret the Constitution approached it very much like how biblical scholars interpret the Bible. The originalists sought to go back to the very original meaning of the text whereas the liberals sought to reinterpret the Constitution but in a way that stretched its proscriptions.

Again, the chapters are hit and missed, based upon one's interests. Rodgers provides us with a sprawling intellectual history that is useful for gaining a broad brushstroke of the period but its fast pace doesn't allow it to go into the details.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some books win prizes because they're excellent; some books win prizes because they're timely. Chalk Rodgers' Bancroft up to timeliness, I'm afraid. This is a solid history of ideas in America since the seventies: new market-based politics; reactions to and extensions of '60s moral liberalism and relativism; constitutional scholarship; the post-war social sciences and reactions against them, particularly in terms of identity politics; historiography; political philosophy etc etc... He crams a lot in, and does a good job showing that the ideas which have taken hold weren't worth the time and effort and money spent on them.

On the other hand, he makes no effort to explain why the ideas that took hold did take hold, so you're left with a few fragmented chapters that aren't connected to each other in any way. He only deals with ideas that took hold of Americans in America, so there's very little context for what's happening. And despite his good analysis, there's very little suggestion that he finds any of these ideas anything other than mildly interesting - how can he *possibly* have written this book without ascending to rage? As one of the most representative pop-culture acts of this time period (and the ideas he describes) could have told him, anger is a gift! This book is too flat too often.

It will be a great teaching tool for undergrads - much easier to assign his chapter on 'power' than to get students to read any of the many thinkers he deals with in that chapter - but it's unlikely to teach anyone older than 30 much they haven't already got by osmosis. The conclusion is dull, focusing more on 9/11 than the far more momentous G.F. Crisis.

In short: a nice metaphor featuring great description, good analysis, but very much lacking in interpretation (*why* should this age have seen such fracture?), judgment (were any of these ideas any good at all?) and fire.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rodgers is a great historian, but I don't think this is his best book. "Atlantic Crossings" is better. Part of the problem here is that Rodgers is trying to cover too much material. Rodgers argues that, in the period 1975–2000, there was a shift in American public discourse from talking about the needs of society to the needs of the individual. This shift was a major part of the conservative revolution. Around that conservative shift, Rodgers portrays a lot of other movements — critical literary theory, feminist debates, color-blindness vs. affirmative action, etc. He doesn't come up with a good way (or ways) to classify those other movements. Yes, he shows that there was more happening than just conservatism, but he doesn't tell his reader how to classify or group those movements. I also think, in trying to show how a variety of historical trends produced the shift toward individualism, Rodgers downplays the importance of the collapsing Fordist economy and the rise of the fringe political right in causing the shift. I think Jefferson Cowie in "Stayin' Alive," a study of labor and the economy, and Godfrey Hodgson in "The World Turned Right Side Up," a study of political conservatism, do a better job of conveying the shift to idealism. Cowie and Hodgson focus on particular historical themes. Rodgers is trying to cover everything, to the point that the argument in support of his thesis is fuzzy. The age may have been fractured, but this book could have been clearer.

[Vasily Melnikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Age of Fracture, by Daniel Rodgers, is an intellectual history of the late twentieth century in America. The book has breadth, from Rawls to Reagan to Rorty, all united by a sense of splintering. The human, recast as an atom, subjugated to a diffuse power wielded by all fellow humans, whose unity with them is based on contingent parochial distinctions—these are the implications emerging from the disputes and arguments of the late Cold War, Rodgers says.

Of particular highlight, especially given its current consequence, is the tension between the intellectual, economic, empirical right—the Robert Nozicks, Milton Friedmans, and Ayn Rands of the world—and the popular movements they embolden implicit throughout Age of Fracture. The former are pluralists, cosmopolitan, secular if not irreligious. Born from their words are soundbites and witty arguments, wielded by culture warriors, connected to the individualism of an intellectual right by the threat of communism, a threat perceived primarily due to a Protestant work ethic and Marxism’s associations with atheism. All of this osmosis is historically contingent, an effort—and I do not know the relevant history, but I can make a guess—to fuse the passionate movement conservative with the indifferent business interests. The result is an inconsistent American right, asserting the primacy of the market, whether for commodities or ideas, and the individual while trying to remake the social contract into a holy covenant, excluding from that event those separated by the accident of birth or difference in opinion. I conclude that my fellow libertarians, disproportionately represented among the intellectual right, should make more prudent political alliances. However much I admire Margaret Thatcher, she unintentionally sums up the duplicity of it all pretty well: we are told “there is no such thing as a society”, yet “man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence”. But, at least, these were two different speeches.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A weird book! It claims to be, and I believe is, "a history of the ways in which understandings of identity, society, economy, nation, and time were argued out in the last decades of the century, and how those struggles of books and mind changed the ways in which social reality itself would be imagined", or "a history of social thought and social argument [in America] in the last decades of the twentieth century". If I had clocked this the first time I tried to read I might have made it farther, but the first couple of chapters are about presidential rhetoric and economics textbooks in the 1970s. A lot of ground is covered before the end, which wraps around again to the same topics, landing on George W. Bush's "personalist" approach to social order and the Freakonomics incentive engineering cultural moment of the post-9/11 years.

I picked up this book again because I wanted to learn more about the political organization of the fusionist right in the 70s and 80s. The book is not so much weak on religion as not focused on religion, which might be a mistake if the goal really is to understand shifting conceptions of identity society nation etc., but there are some enlightening moments on the collisions of conservative religious thought and public discourse/policy, especially in the section on nostalgia at the beginning of Chapter 7, "Wrinkles in Time". Rick Warren and John Piper and the debate over charter school funding show up, so I reckon Rodgers at least knows what he's sliding over.

[Stephen Scarano · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In these ways, piece by piece, as people tried to think their way through events and experiences using the shifting stock of categories at their disposal, the terrain of common sense shifted. 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."

Daniel Rodgers is a historian of American ideas at Princeton, and you're going to get that. A lot of ideas. An amount of ideas that would leave a person to believe that these are the engines of society's processes and function. Rodgers doesn't wish this to be the takeaway, but it's a kind of magical thinking the reader gets used to---a creeping Platonic-thinking. If you accept that upfront or, like me, learn to live with it, you'll find a broad survey of American thought spanning the 80s onward.

Rodger's thesis does not always feel concrete, and the book ends with an anticlimactic epilogue concerning post-9/11 politics, but the chapters on Presidential speechwriting, free-market economics, and intra-Feminist divisions were novel and illuminating. Overall, I needed this work to be larger; it suffers from its grazing of complex schools of thought (I really got nothing out of the Foucault section).

[Kara]

I take the argument to be that, given the economic failures of the 1970's, there was an intellectual crisis among professionals presiding over the declining fortunes of the United States. Into that vacated intellectual space, economists gained prominence, especially those who espoused simplified economic theories. The subsequent rise of market theory--frictionless market time, individual calculation and choice, private satisfaction of individual desires--filtered into a variety of intellectual disciplines. This had consequences on how scholars conceptualized power, time, welfare, law, etc. These changes are perhaps better described in terms of a fracturing of ideas themselves. There is some mention of other possible genealogies for transformation of ideas: through psychology and through the deliberate work of conservative intellectuals to enact change.

I would have liked a more complete understanding of why the social lens ceased to have explanatory power. Cold War, race, and gender seem undertheorized.

[Henry Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Age of Fracture was an interesting, if scrambled, view of the latter half of the 20th century. It helped me understand just how many competing interests lie within several academic and social movements that I had previously thought as relatively cohesive, especially economics - which I now understand to be a complete battleground of different ideologies. The book also impressed how difficult it is for things to change quickly. Overall, this book broadened my perspective, but it was not easy to read. The sentences were long and winding, and the text was full of jargon. Though it was short in pages, it felt very long. Rodgers does not seem to be writing for a mainstream audience.

[Piker7977 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Age of Fracture is an intellectual history that examines the multitude of perspectives, ideologies, and debates that were forged in the 70s and 80s. Each chapter presents a lager theme and carries them into the 90s. At times the chapters resemble stand along essays. The epilogue concerning 9/11 does a fine job of tying up the ideas described by Rodgers while illustrating how recalcitrant they became in the wake of a national tragedy. The Age of Fracture endured.

[Steve Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ambitious intellectual history of the last third of the 20th century. Rodgers seems to of read everything. He also knows how to summarize. But some of the ways he tries to put together themes, such as the different conceptions of time in history, are forced and strained.

[Zachary Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very impressive piece of historical synthesis, and is smoothly written as well. Rodgers's argument is that in the final twenty-five years of the twentieth-century, conceptions of society and time thinned out.

[Artie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really good survey of big shifts in historiographical debates around shifting ideology in the West. However, it’s really heady writing and sometimes a struggle to get through, as interesting as it is, it feels a bit boring and lacks a strong hook other than the desire to learn.

[Suprada Urval]

Recommended By: Robin Sloan newsletter - week 27 - https://desert.glass/newsletter/week-...

[Billy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the best Intellectual History of the postwar era written.

[Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The good: This is actually a great work for pulling together so many different intellectual texts from so recent a time period (mostly 1970s & 80s). It's a good jumping off point for anyone looking to dig into this era of intellectual history more. There were certainly a lot of trends and shifts in thought that I didn't know about it, so it was valuable for insight into where we are now.

The bad: I felt that Rodgers was not particularly adept at explaining some of the more complicated concepts treated here. Moreover, the narrative was relatively fractured with very tenuous through-lines in each chapter and between each chapter. I thought he often did a poor job transitioning between topics within chapters and developing and connecting themes.

Most importantly, I think he does actually make a pretty solid argument for a fracturing of the American culture over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, but he then tries to argue that 9/11 was a solidifying event that began to reunite a lot of disparate interests and identities in the US. I have to strongly disagree with his assessment here. If anything, I feel like we are even more divided than ever: in areas as diverse as politics, income inequality, self-identifying minority groups, and vision for the future of America.

One other thing jumped out at me in reading this text and simultaneously watching the events in Ferguson, Missouri unfold. I think it's been hard to watch a lot of the events in the Middle East over the last few years and there is a sense in the US that there should be more unity in these regions, that the people should put aside their historical differences and find common bonds to bring stability to their lives, especially in the wake of democratic uprisings. However, I think we often forget how pervasive historical power imbalances are in our lives. I look back on the events of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, which are now respectively 150 and 50 years distant, yet they continue to play a huge role in the way we live our lives. We can point to these two events as distinct fissures that continue to inform disputes in race relations, states' rights, fiscal policy, every election in this country over the last 50 years, etc. When we think about the Middle East, we have to recognize that there have been vast power imbalances in many of these countries over many generations. Although the sides look different from what we are used to seeing, the fallout is the same: either desperation to maintain power (ie. Assad in Syria) or rapid shifts in equilibrium that haven't quite settled yet (ie. Iraq, Egypt). As heartening as it was to see despots fall, I think it will be many, many generations before we start to see real peace in any of these places, let alone here in the US. I still see fracture everywhere.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Won the Bancroft in 2011. Dissects cultural and political scene from 1970 to 2000. conclusions you can guess from title. Chapters on topics like presidential speech emphases, women's issues, academic debates about meaning, etc.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Rodgers, the last decades of the twentieth century were a period of tremendous “disaggregation,” witness to a shift in the language and metaphors used to describe society from the “social” to the “economic.” It was a time when “strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out.” During the Age of Fracture, Americans began to parse society, economics, identity and history through the metaphor of ‘the market.’ Once seen as a tool, “indispensible to society,” markets were now seen “as metaphors for society as a whole.” The metaphor of the market acted as a sort of universal solvent, dissolving all of the ‘essentialized’ categories of the post-war period: power, race, gender, citizenship, and time itself. “What changed, across a multiple of fronts” wrote Rodgers, “were the ideas and metaphors capable of holding focus the aggregate aspects of human life as opposed to its smaller, fluid, individual ones.” Keynesians had considered political-economy beginning from the “aggregate categories” of macroeconomics; the Age of Fracture saw political-economy reimagined from “microeconomic principles outward.” Gone were the concepts through which society in the Keynesian Age had been understood; the individual, and individual choice was all that remained.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Across multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggation, a great age of fracture." (3)

"Individualized and privatized, released from its larger burdens, freedom was cut loose from the burdens and responsibilities that had once so closely accompanied it." (40)

"Talk of a social citizenship as extensive as the nation itself was less and less often to be heard. The social contract shrank imaginitively into smaller, more partial contracts: visions of smaller communities of virtue and engagement -- if not communities composed simply of the rights-holdin self." (198)

"[T]ime had wrinkled. One might reach nostalgically for a fragment of the past, but the time that dominated late-twentieth century social thought was now." (255)