Studying the Fault Lines

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 crust—and the liberation from those old foundations might allow for a stronger social integration than ever before.

But then—and almost immediately—a 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. Rodgers's 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?"