A Response to Age of Fracture

Dissolution, fracture, disaggregation—these are phenomena that can be found in all historical eras. Gibbon focused his great history not on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire but on its decline and fall. Brooks Adams wrote The Law of Civilization and Decay, and his brother Henry, in A Letter to American Teachers of History, attempted to base a science of history on the second law of thermodynamics, a formula of dissipation. Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order chronicles a heightening sense of disorder among turn-of-the-century Americans. More recently, Jacques Barzun wrote From Dawn to Decadence, a history of Western culture, in which the 20th century marks a falling away from coherence and greatness. The words "rise" and "formation" feature in a great deal of political history, but almost all imperial history, from Roman to Soviet, seems to beg the question of decline, as does much cultural history. Dissolution is integral to the study of history.

What captivates Daniel Rodgers in his daring new history of American social thought from the 1970s to the 1990s is not so much the fact of fracturing. It is, rather, the considered and enthusiastic embrace of fractures, of downsizing, of microeconomics, of individualism, of gender trouble, of ethnic and racial hybridity, and of impermanence itself, for this embrace is peculiar to the period Rodgers is analyzing. If Age of Fracture does not describe the collapse of an ancien régime, it does address a philosophical flight from order, perhaps even a kind of philosophical decay. Fracturing is so emphatically the dominant theme of this book that its title lacks an article. What could have been the age of fracture is—more poetically, more pointedly—age of fracture. Though his tone is never celebratory, Rodgers is as eager to avoid nostalgia for the past as he is the conservative trope of decadence.

Rodgers, a pioneer in new historiographical terrain, has written a brilliant synthesis. Age of Fracture, he notes in his essay above, "traces out a braid of themes—markets, politics, power, gender, race, society, and time." This thematic alignment alone demands a vast synthetic intelligence, which helps Rodgers to range from law review articles to undergraduate economics textbooks to literary theory to the speechwriting of Peggy Noonan. The other kind of synthesis in Age of Fracture is more subtle. Rodgers refuses to separate Right from Left, Democrat from Republican, radical from conservative. In his historical world, nothing happens in isolation, and no simple pendulum swings from one national mood to another. Instead, politics is a perpetual battle for meaning, in a manner anticipated by Contested Truths: Key Words in American Politics since Independence, which Rodgers published in 1987, the penultimate year of the Reagan presidency. It is precisely this unending contest over words—and for the ideological upper hand—that gives shape and texture to a historical era.

No historian of the United States pays closer attention to words than Daniel Rodgers, and the insight yielded is astonishing. Liberals, radicals, and conservatives organized their thoughts and formed their imagination on a thinning notion of the social, he argues, starting in the 1970s and culminating in the Iraq War that began in 2003. As they did so, their awareness of one another was crucial. Within and between Left and Right, "the emergent talk of fluidity and choice grew in tandem with contrary desires for centers and certainties, each drawing on the other's energy," Rodgers writes in Age of Fracture (145). This is the insight on which the entire synthesis turns. In a book about fracture and disaggregation, Rodgers does the careful work of aggregating disparate areas of American intellectual culture and of finding the impetus inherent to all of them, exploiting the gentle oxymoron inscribed in his title. The will to have less in common is what Americans had in common in the 1980s and 1990s.

Age of Fracture raises two questions, without fully answering them. One is about causality and the other about Ronald Reagan.

For Rodgers, ideas are anything but epiphenomenal. They never simply cause change, but neither do they chase after some more important...