Age of Fracture

This book is a bravura work of intellectual history that will be of great interest to specialists in the field but also accessible to general readers. It covers the period from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century (with an epilogue dealing with post 9/11 America). Rodgers sees this time frame as marking a significant break with the past; the period became defined by fracture - old presumptions, modes of identity and consensus fell quickly. In their stead were vociferous debates about many issues - race, economic theory, power, and more that had, only recently been settled, at least in the minds of many intellectuals. The economic crisis of the 1950s in large part set the stage for reconsiderations of the familiar, and the rise of the Reagan revolution brought fractures into full view. With consensus a myth (although still a powerful one at least in aspects of Reagan's oratory), the era's thought and politics exploded with new views. Rather than quiet debate, the clamor fed into a hardening of the arteries of discourse which helped birth the present era of punditry and partisanship.The fracturing of American thought and culture, as presented by Rodgers, energized in many ways the conversation of intellectuals. Some concepts quickly led to dead ends, others blossomed into new ways of thinking about markets or identity or gender. Rodgers is quite interesting, for instance, when he ties the cultural wars to gender concerns. And he is quite strong, too, on economic theory, which he manages to present with both depth and accessibility. And the sweep of his knowledge and eye for the telling quote is impressive.Rodgers has, perhaps paradoxically, managed to produce a synthesis for an age of fracture. Yet he demonstrates how various theories cut across disciplinary lines in quick and devastating fashion. Hence, maybe more attention would have been welcome to how newly developing lines of communication allowed a fractured culture to be hemmed together, albeit in a manner bound to unravel.

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 much in 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.

Rodgers comes with plenty of credentials as a historian so this book could be assumed to (and does) have a sound foundation in historical facts, nicely incorporated with references that don't disturb the flow of the narrative. And a complex narrative it is of how the self has come to be redefined in the last thirty years from an entity that fit within various supportive social and economic circles and found comfort there to the freewheeling individual assumed by current libertarians, often a barely viable financial unit though with the visions of and identity with millionaires, even billionaires. Rodgers takes you through this line of argument from the perspectives of modern markets and power structures, as well as from race and gender. It is a book that challenges the reader starting with challenges to his/her ability to follow the discussion, one not to be read while trying to get to sleep. In my opinion Rodgers book is complementary to Robert Pippin's "Hollywood Westerns and American Myth" for the way it seeks to explain how, correctly or not, Americans increasingly seem to define themselves less from empirical circumstances and more from the myths and fantasies they encounter in their lives whether derived from entertainment or from political leaders. No wonder there is current, renewed interest in the novels and thinking (if it can be called that) of Ayn Rand.

A fascinating review of the various scientific and ideological threads vying for dominance within American culture over the last half-century or so. Rodgers summarizes schools of thought and political implications of the social sciences in breakneck speed. The reader will benefit if she has a background in at least one social science in order to understand the changes he describes. Economic science in particular gets analyse for its impacts on basic cultural arrangements and understandings in the larger society. Rodgers is not so interested in why any one theory or school has its day in the sun so much as to chart how we have got to where are at the present moment in history. A tour de force of historical summary and analysis. I highly recommend this book for serious thinkers about our current social organizational situation.

All ok