Daniel Rodgers's (New) Consensus History

In 1971 Richard Gillam collected the work of the most influential American thinkers of the previous two decades. The anthology, significantly titledPower in Post-war America, excerpted the writings of a diverse range of intellectuals offering often antagonistic views of American politics, economy, and society: David Riesman and C. Wright Mills, Talcott Parsons and Gabriel Kolko, to mention but a few. "Power," Gillam insisted in his introduction, "is a word currently much in the public vocabulary." While Americans disagreed over the nature of their society, the degree of democratic participation, the extent of elite control, and the depth of ethnic and class conflict, what Gillam called "the dilemmas of power" dominated debate among American intellectuals and scholars.¹ Disagree as they might, postwar thinkers shared a common vocabulary, a common intellectual agenda.

Gillam assembled the book as a primer, a guide to the most pressing issues of the day. But Gillam, Daniel Rodgers suggests, instead collected relics—ideas, concepts, controversies that would mean little to the next generation of American thinkers. According to Rodgers, the early 1970s marked an important pivot in American intellectual life: "One heard less and less about society, history, and power; one heard more and more about individuals, contingency, and choice." Political leaders no longer stressed shared sacrifice and American national destiny, social movements traded the vocabulary of collective action for ever more fragmented notions of identity, and Keynesian macroeconomics was submerged under the wave of market analysis and rational choice theory. The very language of American intellectual life shifted; new keywords emerged—different ways of framing the world that helped conjure new social arrangements.

The backdrop for these intellectual transformations was a potent reordering of American political and economic life. A generation of unchallenged U.S. global economic hegemony, widely shared prosperity, and declining inequality gave way to an uncertain new era of stagnation, inflation, and economic restructuring. Meanwhile, a rising New Right challenged the liberal consensus in American politics. The New Deal order collapsed, inaugurating an era of divided government, intense partisanship, and ideological polarization (at least among the political class), while powerful movements for civil rights and women's liberation fragmented.

The 1972 Democratic Convention, from the documentary One Bright Shining Moment (2005).

Experiences that had knit together postwar Americans, like near universal military service in World War II and expanded access to higher education, ceased to bind an increasingly diverse population. Institutions that had played an integrative role—labor unions, mainline Protestant churches, the Democratic Party, the television networks—lost membership, market share, and influence. Income inequality, on the decline since the New Deal, accelerated, as the nation once again became a "winner-take-all" society.

But this unraveling social order and the political conflict it engendered are not the principal subjects of Age of Fracture. Economic and political structures, Rodgers rightly insists, do not simply pull ideas along in their slipstream; economies and political systems are fundamentally rooted in "ideas, practices, norms, and conventions" (9). Thus, Rodgers's is a history of what Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan called "big books," of "acts of mind and imagination and the ways they changed America in the late twentieth century" (10, 13).

The conclusions will surprise most observers. Beneath the veneer of conflict and partisanship that occasions so much hand wringing in contemporary public discourse, Rodgers discerns remarkable harmony. Indeed, "Age of Fracture" refers not to the absence of, or the collapse of, an intellectual consensus, but rather to the creation of one—the widespread resonance of a view of the world as atomized, indeterminate, fractured. "Mental images of society," Rodgers asserts, "became more fragmented and gated, broke into individualized pieces, and lost dimensions of power." Just as Gillam's anthology uncovered a set of core assumptions underlying conflicts over ostensibly fundamental questions—Robert Dahl, C. Wright Mills, and David Riesman might disagree over which groups exerted power over American society and how effectively they did so, but they all asked the same questions in terms any of them could understand and debate—so Rodgers posits a new consensus in social thought. Over the last quarter of...