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  • On a Darkling Plain
  • Donald T. Critchlow (bio)

In his famous poem "Dover Beach" (1867) Matthew Arnold laments, "Nor certitude, no peace, not help for pain; / And we are here on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night." Now, a century and a half later, historian Daniel Rodgers, arguably the academy's most engaging intellectual historian of modern America, maintains with no less eloquence or concern that the once reigning consensus of intellectual life has come asunder in a confusion of ideas, which undermines our agreement on both basic concepts and what makes for a stable and content society.

Rodgers writes that the "war of ideas" waged between the Right and the Left in the last quarter-century reflects "the breakup into fragments of the block ideas that had dominated American social thought in the middle years of the century." In those consensus years structuralism dominated social thought. American intellectuals agreed that "[h]uman beings were born into social norms." One's place in the social structure sorted out one's life chances through the forces of history and its traditions and constraints. This structuralist interpretation of society and culture was manifest in the "big books of the 1940s and 1950s." In the 1970s structuralist interpretations began to fall apart as talk of society and history, continuity and tradition was replaced by discussions about individuals, contingency, and choice. "Identities became fluid and elective," Rodgers writes, and "the idea of the social broke into pieces." Behind the fierce partisan political wars of the Reagan years and beyond was a confusion of ideas that plagued both economics and the humanities. Even the meanings of terms such as "the market"—let alone race and gender—could not be agreed upon.

Rodgers is on safer ground when he looks at poststructuralism's influence on the humanities than when he examines economic thought. For example, in his book he casts Milton Friedman's monetarism as a failed intellectual and policy prescription. He argues that the "death knell" of monetarism (specifically, aggregate targets of money supply) came in early 1981 when Fed chairman Paul Volcker abandoned aggregate targets. Economists concluded that "aggregate money in exchange in modern societies was in practice beyond a central bank's power to estimate, control, or even effectively define." Rodgers adds: "With that, much of the rest of monetarism's larger intellectual structure fell apart" (55). Monetarism dissolved into "an ad hoc collection of smaller puzzles and ingeniously modeled solutions." What was left was a hollow intellectual victory for microeconomics, "a choice-theoretic universe of myriads of near-rational actors" (68).

In this discussion of the shifting sands of economic analysis Rodgers clearly favors the Keynesian old school represented by Paul Samuelson and the even older school of institutionalism represented by John Kenneth Galbraith. He therefore applauds the revival of neo-Keynesian macroeconomists, including Gregory Mankiw, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, and Ben Bernanke. But was it not Ben Bernanke who told Milton Friedman on his 90th birthday on November 8, 2002, "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna [Schwartz, Friedman's wife and coauthor]: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again"?1

Rodgers is far too confident in his opinion that economists lack firm monetary measurements. While conceptual and statistical issues abound in measuring money in circulation, the Federal Reserve, as former Fed economist Stephen H. Axilrod notes, does provide a "clearly definable and measurable 'moneylike' substance, known as the 'monetary base.' The rise and fall of the base is reflected through changes in the Fed's overall balance sheet, which combines the individual Reserve Banks' assets and liabilities."2 While theoretical debates rage among economists, monetarists and non-monetarists alike, in the actual world of monetary policy there are set and clearly defined economic measurements, which may be modified and redefined by experience. This is hardly the confusion comparable to what is found in most of the humanities.


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