Age of Fracture

by Daniel T. Rodgers

the shifts in business practice and structures and to ease them out of the moral categories of aggressors, greed, and victims.5

Still, power remained. The new regime of more aggressive and quickly acting investment capital, the financialization of management decisions, the precipitous rise and fall of corporate entities, the offshoring of production, and the decline of labor union membership: all this formed the new inst...

Meese singled out the new class for its thoroughgoing antagonism to the values of everyday American citizens. A special section on new class theory made its way into James Q. Wilson's American government textbook. "A spectre

Woke strikes again

displacement in the vogue of new class analysis on the right. The subjects at the theory's center were no longer the corporate managers of Burnham's early formulation. What conservative new class theorists put in their place was modern society's still larger array of knowledge

Symbols were its means of production, and capture of the state power was the object of its class interest. "What wealth is to a capitalist, what organization is to an old-style political boss, what manpower is to the trade unionist, words are to the new class,"

But for all its limitations, the new class idea for two decades carried powerful intellectual traction. It packaged conservative resentments against the growth of state power in a language that

But what propelled those moves were not the needs of the bloc interest groups, as the pluralists had imagined it, or interests of a new knowledge class, but the microphysics of individual political action.

distortions were pervasive. Behind all of these works stood the civic actor and legislator as calculator and self-interestedly "rational" actor, sniffing out advantages, cycling through tactically shifting alliances, extracting goods and resources from the political system, burdening collective action with private ends, maximizing reelection chances by carefully calibrated policy positioning.13

Under the weight of these analyses the idea of governance as an expression of the public good all but evaporated. Riker and Buchanan were explicit in their methodological individualism. Phrases like "the will of the people" or "what society wants," Riker insisted, were meaningless and misleading figures of speech.

swept into the universities in the next two decades. Rational-choice theory's ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s was "meteoric," the political theorist Rogers Smith writes. "From the mid-1970s on, virtually all the nation's leading [political science] departments competed vigorously to recruit the leading scholars in rational choice."

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 blocs, in which the organization

"draw large conclusions from small but very densely textured facts." But as Geertz brushed by rival ways of reading societies-as systems of production and exchange, systems of authority and behavioral rules, systems of social differentiation and inequality, structures of cosmic belief and ideology-the audacity of Geertz's "foundational critique" of anthropology

demographic power made less and less intuitive sense. Power lay in meanings, in the very ability of a cultural form to give shape to the welter of experience, to spin reality into its forms.50

tried, from moment to moment, to contain

were the mode of science were also processes of control, which not only categorized the self but also helped profoundly to constitute it. The ubiquitous practices through which subjectivities were structured were as clear an articulation of power as the organized interest groups and power blocs that had once been taken as power's primary manifestation.

"Culture" was not in Foucault's vocabulary; power was to be found not in consciousness or ideology, he insisted, but in tactics and strategy.

compared with The Third Wave's twenty-six weeks.

In public choice theory, democratic governance was deeply problematic; individuals were players in games shot through with suboptimal outcomes. For the futurologists, democracy sprang naturally out of the network society, and individuals were society's new sovereigns. In Foucault's readings of power, discourses circulated with terrifying effect; for the futurologists,