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He was deliberately out of step in the 1970s in defending the case for wage and price controls in season and out and for suggesting that the large business firms that dominated the modern economy lived in a world of administered prices and advertising-generated demand that had nothing seriously to do with his colleagues' idealized notion of markets.
"In eliding power," economics "destroys its relation with the real world." It "becomes, however unconsciously, a part of an arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he is, or will be, governed."'
State-to investment capital.
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 institutional backdrop on which the search for an adequate language of power would take place. It did not, in itself, dictate that it would be so hard to find.
Still other critics pointed out that Ronald Reagan, who from his radio
days forward had lived and worked completely within the manipulation of symbols, was a perfect new class man-as, for that matter, were conservatives like Kristol himself, enmeshed in the project of developing what in strict class-analytical terms should have been impossible, a conservative counterintelligentsia of knowledge and symbol workers whose ideology ran at cross purposes to its class interests.
game theory and microeconomics.
All the new American labor historians read The Making of the English Working Class, and most of them worked, in one way or another, within the field of force it cast. Class had no predesigned shape in Thompson's scheme, no singular ideological language.
Among the younger American labor historians, however, the embrace of "culturalism" was quick and enthusiastic.
Political theorists like Steven Lukes and Murray Edelman were already worrying the question of power's culturally veiled faces. They manifest themselves in the strikingly different ability of groups and persons to articulate their needs
The heroism of the slaves was to take the terms of planter paternalism and press them as hard as they could: to bargain for reciprocal favors, to pin the masters to the terms of reciprocity that their claims of rule implied, to wrest from the masters' paternalism the masters' recognition of the slaves' own humanity.
Reagan's and Thatcher's abilities to peel away part of the labor vote from the Democratic and Labor parties, the steady decline in U.S. labor union membership, and the shrinking of
the progressive political coalitions all took a toll on the confidence with which a history of the making of an American working class had begun.
The still more influential turn in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however,
was not toward linguistic structuralism but toward the looser categories of symbolic anthropology.
it was everywhere.
If Foucault's accounts of insidious and inescapable power gained traction,
however, it was also because there was something discernibly recognizable in them.
Power remained as it always does: instantiated in institutions, inequalities, and constraints.
Attempting to create moral solidarities, the programs for moral regeneration sliced into the solidarities of race in ways that were often painfully divisive.
For most white Americans as the age began, race was just as powerful a social reality as it was for Alex Haley.
"Color blind" was an aspiration, a lawyer's tactical maneuver, a linguistic hijacking of the opposition's rhetoric.
the armed forces, the era's administrations quietly sustained an affirmative action program that, by the 1990s, had remade the face of the Army officer corps.
For feminists interested in the deep power of words, Paris, to be sure, was not the only site where models were to be found.
But already the gender pattern had started to turn. "Around 1981," as Jane Gallop was to remember it, the year of Reagan's inauguration, the year before the ERA's ratification deadline expired, the year in which the first reports of gay men dying from an unknown virus began to circulate, the signs of feminist interest in the new theories of language began to multiply.
The turn to Paris-originated "theory" in 1980s America was, in queer theory as in
feminism, a move on the axis of sexuality and gender.38
unruly multiplicity of women's voices that had spilled into the public arena.
The entry of these once-marginal Protestants into politics came, like that of post-Vatican II American Catholics, from a new sense of power.
The poststructuralist turn in the academy had not been an issue for those who first rallied against the ERA or joined the picket lines at an abortion clinic. What shocked them were the potential consequences of women's new claims to rights and choices, not the later attempts of feminist intellectuals to break out of the prison house of language. But
At the Falwell rallies for a moral America at the height of the culture wars, flags were everywhere.
But if the flag stood for aspirations for a common national culture, it also symbolized the nation's claims on the individuals who composed
To start from the libertarian end was not to imagine justice as an end-pattern but to think of justice as a process-to make a "historical" account of justice, as Nozick put it.
Walzer. Whereas his debating partner, Robert Nozick, had largely kept his distance from day-to-day policy debates, Walzer was deeply and publicly immersed in the new politics.
The cure constructed the disease and fed on its own perverse failures.
William F. Buckley, Jr., who came closer to acting as keeper of conservative intellectual orthodoxy than any other figure of the day, had written in the early 1970s that state-administered welfare provision for the poor was "a question of fine moral, political, and economic tuning" which could not be answered dogmatically in the abstract.
"Every group its own historian," was the historian Peter Novick's observation of the trend.20
This was the context into which the new attorney general, Edwin Meese, strode a month later to announce that the Reagan administration would pursue, henceforth, a systematic "jurisprudence of original intention."
The crisis that had launched the age was a breakdown in economic predictability and performance, drawn out over a decade.
Within the Bush administration, the disconnect between social aspirations was particularly striking. After two decades of Republican party assertion that private citizens knew how to spend their money better than did tax-extracting government officials, there was to be no back-tracking on tax cutting.
