Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (review)

With Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America, historian Peter Stearns directly enters a number of long- and short-term conversations about the consequences of modernity for American life. Two of these conversations stand out as more important than the rest. The first involves the deeply-rooted, ongoing scholarly discussion of American national character. The second, related to the first but usually pursued more directly outside of the academy, involves contemporary worries about “moral decay” and the decline of civility. Bridging these concerns, Stearns counters claims of declining self-control by painting a detailed portrait of American social life in the twentieth century. Rather than a licentious, impolite, “slatternly society” (in journalist George Will’s phrase) (p. 8), Stearns finds contemporary America bounded by expectations for self-control surpassing even those of the Victorians.

Stearns, well known to readers as the founder and editor of these pages, is in the full bloom of a prolific writing career that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Author and editor of scores of books and articles, Stearns has pioneered in numerous areas of inquiry, most prominently the history of the emotions. His studies are famous for combining a bold range—of time span, region, subject—with an eye for absorbing specifics that zeroes in on the significance of otherwise elusive subject matter, such as the history of anger, jealousy, or American “cool.” His books on these matters join those of only a handful of other authors like sociologist David Riesman and Phillip Rieff ¹ whose great insight has captured essential shifts in American character. Stearns’s approach is as close as American historians usually come to the rich, provocative labors of the ambitious “mentalities” historians of Europe—particularly those inspired by the Annales school—who sought through intensive examination of a specific time and place or event or else through a broader look at the “longue durée,” to get at the world view of a particular people and its roots in structural realities.

In an often breathtaking synthesis, Stearns calls on much of his earlier findings on the history of various emotions, ² as well as new research, to address a fundamental paradox that has remained unexplored—and even unstated—in both contemporary debates about civility and scholarly explorations of American character. While the twentieth century has brought new freedoms, new openness to self-expression, and growing informality, it has also seen the rise of new restraints and even a regimentation and rationalization of instinct and emotion. Critics who think Americans are at risk of losing the manners and morals that traditionally acted as controls on their desires and impulses, in Stearns’s view, rely on a simplistic and misleading differentiation between imagined Victorian propriety and current-day license. The real story, he says, involves the rise of new and different areas of self-control.

Stearns turns first to the Victorian era to show that, although middle-class notions of respectability stressed good character and self-mastery, the result was not an unmitigated success, nor were individuals entirely left to their own initiative. On the one hand, the age’s well-known double standards and hypocrisy allowed for deviation from self-control—as in the case of men’s visits to prostitutes—and particular outlets for profuse emotionalism—as in romantic love or mourning. On the other, a set of external, “environmental” supports aided individuals in their quest for control, including entertainments laced with a heavy dose of moral instruction. It is precisely the absence of these external supports that forced twentieth-century Americans to rely more on their own inner resources than ever before. Just as Michel Foucault described earlier in Discipline and Punish, ³ Stearns thinks that formal rules and structures of discipline gave way to the internalization of norms for control. The twentieth-century movement toward what historian Cas Wouters calls “informalization,” which arose in the wake of the...