Customer Reviews

The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism

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Fogel's purpose is to provide "a framework for analyzing the movements that shaped the egalitarian creed in America." Throughout U.S. history, there have been several of these movements ("Great Awakenings") which help to explain all manner of major transformations. The First (1730-1820) is manifest in the American Revolution. Fogel observes: "Steeped in the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and harboring suspicions of the established churches, the leaders of the Revolution tended to view all political issues through the prism of natural rights rather than divine revelation."

As Fogel explains, the leaders of the The Second (roughly 1800 until 1870) "preached that the American mission was to build God's kingdom on earth....An array of reform movements [eg temperance, abolition of slavery, elimination of graft in government] sought to make America a fit place for the Second Coming of Christ." The Third (from about 1890 until the 1930s) involved a continuation of certain reforms as well as the introduction of others led by modernists and Social Gospelers who "laid the basis for the welfare state, providing both the ideological foundation and the politic drive for the labor reforms of the 1930, 1940s and 1950s, and for the civil rights reforms of the 1950 and 1960s, and for the new feminist reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s."

In Fogel's view, the Fourth Great Awakening now underway has resulted in attacks on material corruption, the rise of pro-life and pro-family movements, campaigns for values-oriented school curricula, an expansion of tax revolt, and an attack on entitlements. Fogel observes: All of the Great Awakenings are "not merely, nor primarily, religious phenomena. They are primarily political phenomena in which the evangelical churches represent the leading edge of an ideological and political response to accumulated technological, economic, and social changes that undermined the received culture."

As stated previously, Fogel's purpose is to provide "a framework for analyzing the movements that shaped the egalitarian creed in America." In process, he places the Fourth Great Awakening within an historical frame-of-reference. Here is the sequence of subjects analyzed:

Introduction: The Egalitarian Creed in America

One: The Fourth Great Awakening, the Political Realignment of the 1990s, and the Potential for Egalitarian Reform

Two: Technological Change, Cultural Transformations, and Political Crises

Three: The Triumph of the Modern Egalitarian Ethic

Four: The Egalitarian Revolution of the Twentieth Century

Five: The Emergence of a Postmodern Egalitarian Agenda

Afterword: Whither Goes Our World?

When concluding his analysis, Fogel suggests that the spiritual struggles for those in future generations will be "more complex and more intense than those of my generation." Nonetheless, Fogel hopes they will possess "a maturity and intellectual vitality that will help [them] find better solutions than we have found." Meanwhile, in 2000, will anyone deny that our society has urgent spiritual needs, secular as well as sacred? I agree with Fogel that "Spiritual (or immaterial) inequity is now as great a problem as material inequity, perhaps even greater." Rather than defer that problem to our grandchildren, we have a moral imperative to solve or at least alleviate that problem. To do so, we must first understand the nature and extent of its complexity. I know of no other single volume which can contribute more to that understanding than can The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism.

I am a former teaching assistant for Professor Fogel and read his book as both a student and as his assistant. I have discussed the book with him in private and listened to him defend its propositions before skeptical students. I am also a student of America's religious history. I am not entirely uncritical of his argument but I believe it to be a must read for understanding where we've come from. Despite one reviewer's (Lloyd) misinformed aspertions, Professor Fogel is an historian of the first rank. He won his Nobel prize for his economic history of slavery. He is one of the founding fathers and still one of the best practitioners of scientific economic history (cliometrics). But rather than allowing his empirical approach to history make his writing arid and mathematical, his evident love of the past and its complexities shines through. It is enough of a testiment to the man's extra-ordinary ability to be objective while still being intensely interested that he, as a secular person, is able to correctly credit evangelicals and other religious people with most of the significant ethical advances in American history.

I believe the above reviews from the Wall Street Journal and Mr. Morris do a sufficient job. I am here to recommend it to you. John B. Carpenter jamits@juno.com

Robert Fogel already demonstrated, decades ago, that he could apply econometrics to historical data to good effect. He is a founder of cliometrics, the systematic quantitative study of historical data. From railroads to slavery to nutritional improvements on work capacity, he has had few peers in penetrating tough and politically charged topics.

In this book he asks readers to conjoin political and religious movements with deeper longings for satisfaction from living. Thanks to Richard Easterlin we know that money does not buy happiness. Fogel explores what long-term tendencies in the American past sought to look beyond Benthamite utility for larger meanings. His search will not always be satifying to all readers, particularly those expecting to find a Marxian dialectic at the root of positive change.

In reading the book, non-specialists get a special treat: a non-technical survey of factors that brought on the unprecedented improvements in levels of living in North Atlantic countries over the past two hundred years.

These are not happy days for liberals. Something seems to have gone wrong with the government of experts-like-us that liberals have built over the last century. The idea was that poverty was "not a personal failure, but a failure of society." Liberals reversed societal failure, Fogel writes, with government programs to mitigate material inequality. The result is that the material condition of the poor is much better than it was a century ago.

But the spiritual condition of the poor has deteriorated. Things like "drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken families, violent teenage death, and crime are generally more severe today than they were a century ago."

This is a problem for progressives, Fogel realizes, because unless they get their act together and do something about the "maldistribution of spiritual resources" they are going to lose their political power and their program of egalitarianism.

Fogel sees new hope for progressives in the Great Awakening model developed by William G. McLoughlin in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. The idea is that each existential crisis in American life leads to a religious Great Awakening, and thence to political reform and renewal. If liberals can co-opt the current religious revival then they can develop programs to provide the poor in spirit with spiritual values such as a "sense of purpose," a "vision of opportunity," a "sense of the mainstream of work and life," and so on.

Never mind that such a program of spiritual values would amount to a government church.

Still, this is a worthy look at the progressives' Big Problem and deserves its four stars.

Robert Fogel discusses what he calls 'spiritual inequality", in the hope that the next american spiritual awakening 'fourth great awakening" in American religious Faith will change things. Fogel points ou that change has come in an astonishingy short period, he oints out, technical process has made it possible for almost everyone in the rich world to have food, clothing and shelter: which, a century ago, absorbed 8o% of the average household's consumption. The very meaning of poverty has changed. His book deals with the relationship between, on the one hand, organised religion and its periodic "awakenings", often stimulated by technological change; and, on the other, the political drive of equality. The first "great awakening in the 173os, laid the'Logical basis for the American Revolution, starting in 1800, built up to the abolition of slavery. The "Fourth great wakening" of the book's title is the religious revival that began around 1960. Like the two awakenings, it stressed equality of opportunity. But tis has set it at odds with the third awakening, which began late in the 19th century but cast its shadow throug the 2oth century. Because equality even of opportunity is hard to achieve, it may be that equality of remains forever an unattainable dream. I was disappointed by Fogel's reluctance to go deeper into the religious debate. Will American Christian fundamentalism rise - just as the Islamic one is and roughly as a reaction to modern secular life - and will it clash with secualr Europe?
all in all the book has a worthy purpose but I would have also preferred to see a less 'scientific' or econometric approach. Thomas Frank, Sennett and even Ortega's biography of Sam Walton offer a less theoretical but more compelling view of modern American life.

I found Robert Fogel's perspective on the American cyclical progression of political/religious synthesis enlightening, and refreshing.
Fogel's secular views chime in now and then, but they are under a veneer of worldly experience, not biased partisanism.
I particularly found this book useful, (as I am pursuing a political science degree), and revealing pertaining to the history of American society, and the foundation of American government.

The author of this book seems to have hit upon an interesting structuring of American history, but fails to provide much in the way of new analysis or interesting predictions. I felt as if the entire book was an introduction and prelude to an argument that would actually say something productive. The constant repetition of incomes and health statistics simply confirm the common sense conlusion about where we have gone with material prosperity without providing any real insight into the state of the Union today, or where we can or will go in the future. We will be healthier and richer, with a greater portion of our income spent on higher education in coming years. Swell. Tell us something a fifth grader couldn't predict. I suppose it does give some valuable context to current issues concerning egalitarianism, but wait for the paper-back. The work is anything but "bold". Disappointing is a more appropriate description.

Since my husband and I and most of our best friends were the first members of the "Fourth Great Awakening" I feel qualified to comment here. Frankly, I resent Fogel's high-handed, over-educated, ivory-tower, the-mind-of-man-saves-all misrepresentations of one of the greatest religious movements of all time.

The Fourth Great Awakening wasn't/isn't a socio-economic movement. It's a *religious* movement. We didn't all "awaken" and then run out to get our advanced degrees in urban renewal. We ran out into the streets and proclaimed the Good News that JESUS Christ loves you and you and you and... We weren't called the "New Economists;" we were called JESUS FREAKS. If we felt lead to get further education at all, it was to become ministers, Bible teachers, priests, nuns, missionaries, musicians, publishers --- in short, any kind of communicator that could spread the good news that no matter who you are or where your are, how rich or how poor --- it doesn't matter; GOD loves you and you can change the world for the better, but it first has to start within you. Those who already had degrees and jobs went back changed people from the heart, from the inside out.

Of course, good things came out of this movement and continue on to this day what with the new Modest Women's movement, to a distilling of church attenders, to new laws being written all over the world for everything from Children's Rights to Living Wills to broader world views including new ways to solved global problems besides throwing money and/or artillery at them. But these and many others are *by-products* of a change, not the change itself. GOD reaching down and awakening the human heart is the basis of the Fourth Great Awakening --- not some intellectual exercise on economics nor the belief that enough good brain power can save the world.

Mr. Fogel, we pray for you.

While Dr Fogel's development of the Great Awakening model of US history is interesting, and may shed some light on present cultural attitudes, I find his bright-eyed optimism for the future almost shocking. On hearing about how thoroughly the material problems of the poor have been taken care of already (well, in the States anyway), and how we can depend on technology to keep on generating solutions to all problems as they arise, the food supply will actually become more abundant even as population increases, etc, I ask myself what planet is this gentleman writing about? Fogel seems to blithely assume that the economic growth of the past century can be extrapolated into the next, even as the efficient agricultural methods he counts on are depleting the fertility of croplands and accelerating erosion of topsoil, as drug-resistant pathogens proliferate, and as ecosystem after ecosystem goes to the wall (there is one paragraph on stresses to the environment as a possible problem). How ivory a tower must such a writer inhabit?

My first review of this book is the Customer Review dated June 6, 2000. Without retracting anything I wrote in that review or my rating of the book, I would like to supplement my first review by suggesting three "entry-points" into the book for serious-minded readers:

(1) Mr. Fogel writes on page 10 - 'Technological advances in distilling reduced the costs of spirits and made it possible for the urban poor to afford immoderate amounts of alcohol. Reductions in the cost of ocean transportation brought huge waves of immigrants into American labor markets, lowering wages and promoting urban unemployment.' (From roughly 1875 through 1914.)

Consider the perspective of a social scientist who acknowledges the massive destitution of pre-World War II workers and their families in America (see next paragraph), but who finds remarkable causally the cheap ocean transportation rates paid by immigrants and their immoderate alcohol consumption in America; and who nowhere mentions either the industrial magnates who benefited -- not coincidentally -- from those two phenomenon, or the American labor movement which was fought most effectively for years by those magnates using those immigrants as scabs and strikebreakers. Maybe it's time to stop thinking of Robert Fogel as a historian, and consider him simply a practitioner of the world's greatest pseudo-science, economics.

(2) Mr. Fogel writes on page 177 - 'The new equity issues in the United States do not arise from the shocks of rapid urbanization, the destruction of small businesses by competition from industrial giants, the massive destitution created by the prolonged unemployment of up to one-quarter of prime-aged workers, the disappearance of the frontier as a safety valve for urban unemployment and poverty, or the undernutrition and premature death of the great majority of urban workers and their family members. Quite the contrary, the new issues are to a large extent the product of the solutions to these problems achieved by a combination of economic growth and the success of the reforms advocated by the Social Gospelers, their allies, and their successors.'

Imagine what Mr. Fogel means by the word 'solutions.' And in light of the facts described in the book American Apartheid, for example, consider which population(s) suffering "urban unemployment and poverty" Mr. Fogel thinks have had their problems solved by economic growth and the reforms advocated by the Social Gospelers, etc.

(3) Mr. Fogel writes on page 180 - '....the reform agenda spelled out by the religious Right......more fully addresses the new issues of egalitarianism than does the Agenda of the Third Great Awakening.' (The T.G.A. being the widespread reforms in America beginning at the end of the nineteenth century which led to the rise of the welfare state and policies to promote diversity.)

Imagine what Mr. Fogel means by the word 'egalitarianism.'