BOOKS

Studying the Fault Lines

SA M U E L M OY N
Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers, Harvard University Press, 2011, 352 pp.
least why it might matter to conceive of this latest episode together with the unraveling of the social as a long-term difficulty or cyclical occurrence. But the book does show that the latest rending of the social fabric is new in its forms, which may go beyond the mere individualization of yesteryear and undermine the very endeavor of fixed social categorization. Its also distinctive in the domains in which Rodgers charts it, for instance in thinking about race and gender. And, at the very least, Age of Fracture helps us understand how the recent past set the terms for our current attempts to see society whole and conceive of an agenda for its future. Rodgers, a longtime historian at Princeton University, is known for his sparkling essays in intellectual history as well as for Atlantic Crossings (1998), a major study of the connections between American and European reformers in the Progressive Era. He is a master of his craft; and this book, in which he takes history into the near present, shows what this mastery looks like in practice. Rodgers says that the deepest way our perceptions have changed is at the level of conceptions of the social worldconceptions that connect intellectuals to the practical world of presidents, policymakers, and pundits. In that domain, Rodgers says, a postSecond World War vision of humans embedded in society was replaced rather rapidly after 1970 with a constellation of private acts. Conceptions of human nature that in the postWorld War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history, Rodgers explains, gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Similarly, the forces that made up society also came to be understood differently; as society fractured into its constituent parts, so too the mechanisms of social change were recon-

The very notion of society originated as part

of a highly optimistic scenario: according to Enlightenment belief, human bonds were evolving in the eighteenth century beyond the need for any social anchor in the transcendent divine, the monarchical ruler, or even the aristocratic upper crustand the liberation from those old foundations might allow for a stronger social integration than ever before. But thenand almost immediatelya gnawing fear of perilous dissolution set in. Society began to seem recognizable only in and through its fissuring. Soon after the French Revolution stories of the collapse of a prior organic whole became popular. If society now existed at all, it was only as a way of thinking about the aggregate effects of a more fundamental individualism: a word recently coined, Alexis de Tocqueville mordantly remarked, to express a new idea (our fathers knew only about egoism). Later in the nineteenth century, sociology proper emerged out of the wary perception that communal Gemeinschaft had now slid into particulate Gesellschaft. And the claim of social fragmentation has been repeated endlessly in the twentieth century. Modernity, in short, is the age of fracture. So if Daniel T. Rodgerss new overview of the evolution of American social thought in the last few decades says, once again, that the pervasive trademark of our intellectual world is disaggregation, it is tempting to ask, What else is new? Rodgerss important and well-written book leaves a number of tantalizing questions, not

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ceived. One heard less about society, history, power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice. As real choices of lifestyle and goods exploded, the metaphor of choice as a fundamental way of understanding society went even further. Only a few Americans concludedas Margaret Thatcher famously didthat the concept of society ought to be junked; yet by the end of the process, the webs of dependence and connection that joined the disaggregated selves had become far harder to articulate. Rodgers begins his study with presidential rhetoric since 1945, showing how changes in the language afford a useful focus on the larger evolution of social thought. But insofar as Rodgers traces how a contagion of metaphors unraveled the social imaginary back to its epidemiological source, he finds it first in economic theory. Before practices had fundamentally shifted, or atomism became ascendant in other realms, neoliberals were dreaming of disaggregation. Rodgers gives a remarkably lucid and wellinformed account of the rediscovery of the market, one consolidated in the teeth of economic turmoil and well before Ronald Reagan came to power. Such visions couldnt have followed from actual economic transformations, Rodgers insists, because they anticipated and drove them. The terrain of this process was the field of ideas and perception, as he puts the point more generally, not, in the first instance, society itself. It is a pity that Rodgers doesnt pause to spell out the implications of his approach to intellectual history. Surely he doesnt believe that developments at the level of practice were wholly irrelevant for shifts in theory and metaphor. Visions of a harmonious market that were soon to burgeon were poor descriptions of the very social circumstances of their birth: the oil shock and energy crises of the 1970s, Rodgers points out, make enchanted visions of the market of the era look like autistic delusions out of step with their own time. But that doesnt make intellectual history the study of ideas as basically autonomous forces, in the 1970s or any other decade. Rodgers is right to focus on the importance of metaphors in the social imagination, but by sometimes characterizing them as free-

floating variables he also risks reproducing his age of fracture in the way he studies it. If it is wrong to reduce ideas to practices, it is just as mistaken to segregate them from each other.

After Rodgerss diligent reconstruction of

shifts in economic assumptions, his book becomes even more ambitious. In three thematic chapters that follow, Rodgers links the great unraveling of the social in ascendant versions of economic thought to shifts in theories of power, race, and gender. All of the chapters share the same strategy. They start out with a pre-1970s baseline robust theories of identifiable power structures or plainspoken assumptions about race as a self-evident social factand then show how diverse and often strange bedfellows conspire in undoing it. All three chapters unite what has come to be known in the academic world as postmodernism with the general syndrome of individualization and marketization. Rodgers ultimately links these transformations to ones affecting American temporality, in a creative final chapter that covers such topics as the debate after 1989 on the end of history and the prospect of rapid economic transformation of formerly communist world. Throughout, his touch is generally sure and his synthesis of disparate currents of thought comprehensive. Consider gender. Tocquevilles upbeat report long ago suggested that American society once showed how stable role hierarchies between the sexes could provide a refuge from otherwise dominant modern corrosion. Rodgerss interesting chapter would have Tocqueville turning in his grave (or saying he told you so). For upon the heels of the womens movement that remained powerful into the 1970s came a fierce siege on essentialism that upended the categorical assumptions that had first informed the fight. With Judith Butler and Joan Scott as main characters, Rodgers reviews the incursion of French theory into a domain that had once been dominated by commonsense notions of sisterhood and patriarchy. The turn upon the categories of early-1970s feminismidentity, experience, action, agencywas all but total, and Rodgers shows how conservatives who

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never read Scott were nonetheless driven to insist on the importance of fixed gender norms and roles. It is an absorbing narrative, but it probably goes too far in its attempt to connect intellectual developments inside and outside the academy. Underlying the power, race, and gender chapters of Age of Fracture is an unstated premise that it is fruitful to connect or even equate libertarian or conservative individualism with postmodernist critiques of stable categorization. Yet Rodgers doesnt sufficiently demonstrate what his followers of obfuscating French theorists actually do share with the Right that makes their version of fracture comparable to a resurgent individualism. To take one example, Rodgers is understandably wary of reducing the massive and pervasive academic invasion of Michel Foucaults concept of discipline to the popular craze around Alvin Tofflers futurology. But his books strategy of juxtaposition ultimately depends on saying that the ones pessimism is somehow connected to the others lunatic optimism. [H]ad not the long, complex search for powers ever more subtle faces succeeded, at last, in finding nothing at all? Rodgers asks of Foucaults legacy. Had Foucault redefined power as so insidious and ubiquitous as to be nonexistent to all intents and purposes? Had he made himself an unwitting ally of those who dropped it as a relevant factor in human affairs? I would answer, not really. Its indeed too bad that John Naisbitts bestselling Megatrends failed to thematize power and thus abetted individualization and marketization. But the influence of Foucaults theories ought to be kept separate; not everything is part of the same megatrend. Judith Butler may have been a contemporary of George Gilder, but that was about all they shared. It is unclear why Rodgers homogenizes a number of chiefly academic shifts with his true subject; I gather he wants to avoid the charge of partisanship, insisting as he does that the eras key intellectual shifts cannot be pinned to any single part of the political spectrum. But he is much more convincing about the massive rise in the stock of classical liberalism both in economic and political theory and the more nebulous realm of

editorial offices and Beltway think tanksa development that has undone the Left in the last few generations. If so, a better way to read Rodgerss book is to agree with him that the resurgence of freemarket individualism sometimes affected the Left, often in surprising ways. But this doesnt mean that everything that happened on the Left, misguided or not, fits in the syndrome. And it certainly doesnt mean that the age of fracture did not involve the increasing dominance of notions with distinctively conservative implications. Unfortunately, it did.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the book is its subtle history of political theory, which shows Rodgerss attempt to discern unity in apparent variety at its most persuasive. Acknowledging the tone set for the epoch by John Rawlss 1971 master text, Rodgers reads A Theory of Justice as Janusfaced. On the one hand, it pointed backward to a welfarist high tideof which it, in some sense, provided a metaphysical translation, with its strong commitment to redistributive equality. On the other hand, as Rodgers puts it, the heart of it was steeped in the analytical language of economics and rational choice. The conclusions Rawls reached were communal but his premises were individualist. Rawls may have seemed to let fly the owl of Minerva on the age of welfarist liberalismbut his assumptions were the sad notes of its swan song. Yet at least Rawls had kept national purposes in view, even as the mode of inquiry he had claimed necessarily led to welfarism would soon triumph on its own. His critics, on the other hand, began to disaggregate this sense of larger social purpose: trailing Robert Nozicks attempt to revert to libertarianism on the grounds of Rawlss individualism, other theorists attempted to carve out refuges of local community. Just as Rawls failed to provide a stable defense of the old welfarism, however, communitarianism advanced rather than undercut dissolution. In Michael Walzers progressive version, the classic 1983 Spheres of Justice, communitarianism alluded to the importance of the faltering welfare state. Walzer did, in fact,
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develop a notion of complex equality that paid some deference to a redistributive agenda, even as it was made to be one facet within a pluralistic vision of social goods. But ultimately, Rodgers concludes, Walzer allowed his memory of social democracy to be ousted by his desire to demassify. Labor and exchange did not enter into the argument until almost halfway through the book, Rodgers observes. In his commitment to the local, the plural, the small-scale, and the active, the idea of a single great bargain of each with all evaporated. Thus did political theory on the Left go far toward incorporating the effectively rightward drift of American social imagination. Though left communitarians did not intend explicitly rightist versions of devolution to follow in their wake, it happened anyway. Alongside the new individualism, conservative appropriations of notions such as moral community and social capital teemed. Not infrequently, they were connected to displacement of a therapeutic central government through Tocqueville againa romance of townships, clubs, churches. The little become, as in Walzers left pluralistic vision of justice, the tacit substitution for the whole, Rodgers sums up ruefully.

Rodgerss book is part of a slew of recent

works on the discontinuous character of the 1970s in American life. It towers over other parts of this new wave of scholarship, which often neglect the very intellectual conceptions that, Rodgers shows, sometimes drove the great transformation of post1968 America. However, Rodgers is silent about the implications of his book, which are in fact open to debate. It may occasionally be useful to treat versions of fracture as similar, though only up to a point. Yet for both accounting why fracture occurred and figuring out how to transcend it, everything depends on carefully distinguishing past and potential versions of a more robustly socialized way of conceiving the world and Rodgers is less helpful here. Perhaps out of a desire to present our time in microscopic detail and as a unified whole, Rodgers risks overstating the integration that the age of fracture undidapproaching an

error he became famous for identifying in the fad of republicanism in early American history. Despite having influentially criticized the simplicities of stories of descent from social citizenship into liberal individualism in the deep American past, it is surprising that Rodgers tells a very similar tale about the recent American past. The solidity of the immediate postSecond World War orderthough it did allow for more embedded visions of societywas itself not that great. It is hard to follow Rodgers in taking as a stable point of departure what was in fact a ramshackle achievement from the beginning, one that drew much of its coherence from an economic and political settlement that disintegrated due to structural defects and indeed in the United States more quickly than in its more truly social democratic peers abroad. The problem here is not so much Rodgerss narrow geography, for he frankly confesses his losses from unfashionably studying the United States in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Instead, it is owing more to Rodgerss foreshortened chronology that the book can rest content with so simple a presumption of a prior age of concord. It also hurts Age of Fracture that it remains at the level of description. Not just in the presentation of the foundations in economic thought, but through the books whole architecture, its not clear how fundamentally Rodgers thinks the new fractured social imaginary has tracked the realities of life, especially since he rightly disputes the equation of intellectual perception and practical change. But to say that vulgar materialism is insufficient given the occasional priority of thought to action is not to say enough, and so begs the question of what did the work of undoing and on the basis of what prior and inherited perceptions and difficulties. Indeed, one might argue that if the period before the 1970s undoubtedly featured more embedded visions of individuals in society, it also produced highly imperfect ones that did not break down for nothing. Rodgerss failure to assess how the earlier era of embedding was itself implicated in the age of fracture that followed is potentially dangerous in its programmatic consequences:

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for the book fits very well with a pervasive but misguided current nostalgia for social democracy that could not only worsen the Lefts disorientation but also encourage it to rest content with recovering the very political solutions that were subject to fracture the first time around.

To see why this matters, consider again Rodgerss sly critique of progressive communitarianism. It may be convincing on its own but, like the rest of his book, it is potentially misleading, because it measures the age of fracture against a deeper past it treats as an unproblematic baseline. What happens when that baseline is itself scrutinized more carefully? Is the trouble really that Walzer devolved from social democracyand that other forms of communitarianism were so politically indeterminate or frankly rightist as to be boons for the partisans of disintegration? Or is the trouble that nobody moved beyond a vision of social democracy that has gone into eclipse for good reason? Globally, the postwar age of social democracy and welfare state liberalismthe guttering flame that many aging progressives still guard todaywas one of highly specific and partial successes in overcoming older periods of crisis and it makes considerable sense to cherish its memory. But socially, its response to a far more full-blown nineteenthcentury crisis of disaggregation went much further theoretically than practically, a fact that Rodgers downplays in order to emphasize the radicalism of later changes. Geopolitically, it was dependent not least on a waning era of empire and a global Cold War that achieved a spell of temporary integration at a high price. It bred specific new problems of exclusion

that, in the West European case, provide cautionary lessons more important than the hankering for a lost age of social purposes offers by itself. The land fared ill before neoliberalism further blighted it. The force of these conclusions is redoubled by Rodgerss own. In ending his account, Rodgers persuasively argues that the shock of the September 11 attacks and the patriotic response to it did not provide the sort of instantaneous reintegration for which many initially pined. In a brilliant return to his survey of the postwar speeches of presidents, Rodgers shows that in the wake of the events George W. Bush tried, through his speeches, to anathematize the troubling ascendancy of self. Yet Bushs own global war on terror repeated the simpleminded beliefs in the availability of quick fixes and magical transitions that had been revealed as illusory as recently as the campaigns in the prior decade to remake postcommunist societies. As a result, and in spite of the yearning for setting and healing the break, the years after the attacks actually showed that much of the distinctive intellectual character of the age of fracture would endure. If so, Rodgerss diagnostic survey of the most local and recent turn in the modern cycle of integration and disaggregation is essential reading for thinking about what is to come. But one thing is for sure: the visions of social integration and obligation rent asunder in the age of fracture are not retrievable, and not worth retrieving, unless they are first reinvented.
Samuel Moyn, who teaches history at Columbia University, is author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Belknap/Harvard, 2010).

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