Age of Fracture

by Daniel T. Rodgers

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."3

polarizing its meanings. "What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived," Irving Kristol put the point in

incongruously diverse places in later years, the social movements of the 1960s did not, in the end, set the forms into which the shaken pieces would be recast. The 1960s were a moment of break, but the regrouping around a different set of premises and themes, as Hall describes it, was the work of the era that followed.

Human beings were born into social norms, it was said. Their life chances were sorted out according to their place in the social structure; their very personalities took shape within the forces of socialization.

Structuralist interpretations of society and culture of this sort ran hard through the big books of the postwar years: C. Wright Mills's White Collar, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, and David Riesman's Lonely Crowd. They fueled the rise of social psychology, modal personality studies, social relations theo...

But then in the last quarter of the century, through more and more domains of social thought and argument, the terms that had dominated post-World War II intellectual life began to fracture. One heard less about society, history, ...

But other associations held their own or flourished. Volunteering rates among teenagers rose, megachurches boomed, and advocacy groups of all sorts grew dramatically.9

Social structures persisted. What changed, across

multitude of fronts, were the ideas and metaphors capable of holding in focus the aggregate aspects of human life as opposed to i...

It was the "me decade," the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote famously in 1976: an age obsessed with self-referentiality. The nation, this line of reasoning argues, was caught up in an "age of greed," a new "culture of...

A second and more powerful explanation looks to changes in the institutions of intellectual life. In this reading of late-twentieth-century U.S. history, the key to the age was the conscious efforts of conservative intellectuals and their institutional sponsors to reshape not only the terms of political debate but the mechanics of intellectual production itself.

The notion of a conservative age in American intellectual life, like the notion of Reagan's domination of the era's politics, harbors only half the truth.

A third family of explanations stresses not mood nor politics nor institutions of intellectual production but the deep structures of the late-capitalist economy.

Still, the notion that economic structures moved first, carrying ideas in their wake, does not adequately explain the age. Economies are rooted not only in structures of exchange but also, and just as fundamentally,

Eisenhower warned. Greatness was achieved through devotion, courage, and fortitude, through "the utmost in the nation's resolution, wisdom, steadiness, and unremitting effort."9 Here freedom's "burden" was clearest.

from the world scene to the stealthy, creeping, insidious growth of government at home. "We'll adopt emergency 'temporary' totalitarian measures, until one day we'll awaken to find we have grown so much like the enemy that we no longer have any cause for conflict," Reagan warned in 1961. His tone was disturbing.

In these cheerleading motifs, Reagan's speechwriters retold the story of the American past. The doubts and inner divisions of the revolutionary era, the anguish of the Civil War, the stresses of twentieth-century social change were edited out. The story of a people "born unto trouble" but nevertheless "always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again,"

The list of terms unique to Reagan's inaugurals, however, reads like a handbook of self-actualizing psychology: alive, big-hearted, courageous, daring, dynamic, forward, liberate, progress, robust, reborn, vibrant.34

"There are many difficult things about freedom; it does not give you safety; it creates moral dilemmas; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities," she cautioned in 1978, the year before

Freedom

responsible society," Thatcher urged. In these times of "difficulties," "testing," and "sacrifices," "let us stand together and do our duty."35 The theme that soared in Reagan's rhetoric, by contrast, was that ultimate state of boundlessness: dreaming.

Thatcher Regan

"In this land of dreams fulfilled, where great dreams

the face of higher law. As Meg Greenfield noted at the time, Reagan "is the first president in years who has, at least so far, failed to cultivate the image of crisis and ordeal and almost unbearable testing."40

Reagan amassed affection by distancing himself from his often polarizing policies, by blending his self and his story-telling voice into the fabric of everyday dreams and aspirations, by dissolving the distance between people and president. Abdicating the high presidential style, he let mountains of responsibility roll off his and his listeners' shoulders.

Getting himself out of the way was key to Reagan's gestures. Restoration was his primary rhetorical

verbal system such that government was not the agent, embodiment, or reflection of the people. Rather, government was the people's antagonist, the limiter of their limitlessness.

Government As enemies

The impulse to disaggregate and individualize the people took still more prominent symbolic form in the so-called heroes in the balcony segment of his State of the Union messages.

It 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.

Liberal economists, who in the 1960s had imagined steering the macroeconomy through the turbulence of the business cycle, now warned of the futility of opposing market forces. Let the fundamental economic laws be thwarted, they cautioned, and "the market strikes

economic concepts moved into the center 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

For Smith and his successors, the focus of economic science was on the production, not the exchange, of wealth. That was the question that opened virtually every English-language economics

Macroeconomics in the post-World War II years had tied its prestige to predictive economic models, but their analytical capacity had gone awry.

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. An extremely confident analytical system had failed to explain or to make sense of the unexpected.

Monetarism, in short, turned out to be a bulldozer that could raze a building but could not erect one.

When in the first year of airline price reform, airline fares fell and profits rose, deregulation became, in Martha Derthick and Paul Quirk's words, a "policy fashion," "a buzzword and bandwagon." Between 1979 and 1982, trucking, long-distance bus transport, rail transport, telecommunications, oil, and savings and loan institutions were all substantially removed from regulatory controls.44

and economics teaching took hold, the proposition that the free play of private interests might better promote maximum social well-being than could the active management of regulators and lawyers moved closer and closer to the default assumption.

Whereas the most prominent practitioners of law and economics undertook to replace a historical-institutional sense of society with a precise and arithmetized conception of economic efficiency, the new intellectual movements in economics pushed to its limits the extent to which society could be analytically dissolved altogether into its individual, utility-maximizing parts.

For the most ambitious players in the field, indeed, there was nothing other than rational, optimizing behavior.

All the "irrationalities" that psychoanalysts had relegated to the unconscious, that anthropologists had relegated to "culture," and that historians had ascribed to mysterious shifts in "values," Becker was arguing by 1976, could be more compellingly explained by shifts in costs played out against

work at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. The conceptual core of rational expectations was simple. Economic actors did not simply react to economic information; rather, Lucas maintained, they learned to anticipate economic actions, decoding the rules of thumb of other economic actors and foreseeing their line of action.

Thurow's title, it caught the long-standing strain of pessimism in the mainstream economics tradition: the reflexive self-reminders that theirs was the science of tradeoffs and scarcity, that whatever the free lunch being hawked at the moment might be, it was never really

By the 1990s, however, the dominant strain emphasized the naturalness and boundless freedom of markets. More efficiently than elections and representative government,

whole. But from the temporary collapse of the Phillips curve and the monetarists' relentless exposure of the breakdown in the predictive capacity of Keynesian macroeconomics, to the unanticipated conjunctions of University of Chicago law and economics with the efficiency concerns of an inflationary era; to the rational expectationists' seizure of the implications of inflationary time and behavior; to the supply-side populists' success in channeling an inflation-fueled tax revolt into a federal income tax

Most novel about the new market metaphors was their detachment from history and institutions and from questions of power. As the market grew more abstract, society thinned out into highly reduced microeconomic mental pictures:

The new metaphors of markets and society were a heuristic myth, of course: a...

Manifestly easy to feel, power is notoriously hard to describe and measure. It is both a category of domination-the means and institutions through which the will of some overrides the desires of others-and a category of inequality and differences in scale-a measure

of the unequal capacities of wealth or influence or organizational resources that make domination possible. Power underlines the elements of coercion in social exchange: the monopolization of resources, the distortion of desire, the pinch of necessity, the coercion of consent, the extraction of obedience. The economists' reigning model of exchange stressed, to the contrary, the voluntary character of the act: without a sense of themselves as better off now with the results than they were before, no bargainers would come to agreement.

search for an analytical language of power led toward tighter and tighter embrace of the rational-actor models flowing out of the econom...

But in either case, the dominant languages for power grew thinner, less concentrated, and more difficult to grasp. The struggle for an adequate language of power was to prove much more difficult than Galbraith,

But an economy dominated by old-line corporate managers like Iacocca was already giving way to one dominated by brokers and deal makers, start-up entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, bond traders and arbitrageurs who dealt not in factories and mass-production goods but in capital itself.

capital for better uses; the insistent need