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xiii Preface Equal economic opportunity, what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “the charm of anticipated success,” is an idea essential to America’s national self-definition: an equal chance, a level playing field, a fair race.1 Upon reflection, however, equal opportunity is more complex than a series of simple phrases, especially in those moments when it has functioned less as a description of reality and more as a political doctrine. Cultural groups are bound not only by shared experiences, but by the shared values that provide these experiences with meaning .2 An international survey conducted between 1998 and 2001 found that 69 percent of respondents from the United States, as compared to a median of approximately 40 percent from twenty-six other countries , agreed that “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill,” and 60 percent concurred that “people get rewarded for their effort.” More recently, a study completed in 2011 by the Pew Charitable Trust examined social mobility in ten countries, including the United States, Canada , and European nations, and concluded that “Americans are more likely than citizens of several other nations to be stuck in the same position economically as their parents.”3 This variance between trust in the likelihood of advance for those who work hard and the actuality of more limited mobility illustrates a historic attachment to the ideology of equal opportunity, which stands as a set of beliefs, upon which people act, about how best to structure economic relations and, following this, social and political relations. In this way, ideology is materially represented through conduct that has historical consequences. Life as a race becomes the defining metaphor of the national economic order, where society is a marketplace and the chance to monetarily compete the singular achievement of American social structure.4 And success in this arena garners social and political influence. Preface xiv Celebrants of equal opportunity maintain that the nation’s capacity to absorb ever-greater numbers of people into the orbit of upward social mobility has meant an absence of an entrenched class system and its attendant social conflicts. Accordingly, American history has been witness to a broadening of opportunity’s inclusiveness as a way to rectify past exclusions, particularly of women and racial and ethnic minorities. Such narratives help to fashion a collective identity among so diverse a population. Born of a desire to eradicate aristocratic privilege and to identify nontheological explanations for human behavior, equal opportunity, in the words of political theorist Isaac Kramnick, is “a doctrine originally designed to serve the class interests of the talented ‘have-nots’ against the untalented ‘haves.’”5 At its conception, it represented a socially progressive view that rewarded individual merit over inherited wealth and privilege. Perpetually scarce material resources would now be allocated through free-market competition rather than through birthright. An unregulated economic sphere comprised of small-scale buyers and sellers automatically rewarded individual initiative and hard work, and relied on the fantasy that everyone can potentially “win.” One was no longer destined to endlessly relive the working lives of one’s parents. But as the American economy matured over the course of the nineteenth century competitive capitalism gave way to large-scale industrialization , so that by the end of the century consolidated productive wealth dominated the national economy. As corporate enterprise took hold, the country witnessed a transformation in the size, scope, and nature of manufacture, the diminishment of independent producers, a shift to a permanent wage-labor force, and increasingly vast disparities of wealth. Many began to doubt the existence of equal opportunity, connected as it was to free-market competition and the entrepreneurial dream. An idea formed in relation to one set of productive arrangements (small-scale, competitive capitalism) was, by the close of the nineteenth century, applied to quite different productive arrangements (concentrated capital), a circumstance that revealed a profound disjunction between the nation’s ideology and economic fact. If “America was promises,” the disruptions of industrialization prompted intense disagreement over the meaning of these promises and the circumstances required for their achievement. Membership in labor unions increased, strikes and industrial violence spread, socialist Preface xv and anarchist adherents organized, business organizations formed, and legislative remedies were pursued to curtail the pervasive reach of monopolies and oligopolies. The pressures of the late nineteenth century marked a moment when the contradictions surrounding the ideology of equal opportunity could not be ignored, stresses that allowed this ideology to be used to both instigate systemic unrest and to mitigate the very challenge...

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