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The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power Hardcover – February 17, 2015

4.2 out of 5 stars 158

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A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why?

The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Provocative....A perceptive reading of the current zeitgeist."―Michael Kazin, Slate

"Fraser offers a sweeping, forcefully argued comparison between, on the one hand, the economy, ideology, and politics of the first Gilded Age and, on the other, the contemporary political scene."―
Kim Phillips-Fein, Atlantic

"Sweeping and ambitious....Fraser weaves together a rich tapestry of history, statistics and barely suppressed outrage."―
Maura Casey, Washington Post

"Fascinating....As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics."―
Naomi Klein, New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"Delivered with real verve....Like Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Thomas Piketty's
Capital, butfrom an American perspective, Fraser writes majestically if not almost poetically about the making of capitalism."―Harvey J. Kaye, Daily Beast

"Fraser is particularly passionate and penetrating in his analysis of our present state of submission and surrender. His intention is not just to chronicle the change but to explain why it happened."―
Jon Wiener, Los Angeles Times

"A sharp-edged, completely fascinating look at American history and the contemporary politics of the haves and have-nots."―
Vanessa Bush, Booklist

"Fraser's work shines as an angry but cogent denouncement of America's growing wealth disparity. Highly recommended."―
Library Journal

"An absorbing, vigorous account of class politics....an excellent, very readable recreation of an authentically American form of working-class militancy and its eclipse."―
Publishers Weekly

"Fraser leads the reader on a fascinating and relevant journey." ―
Brian Tanguay, Santa Barbara Independent

"A cutting study of how American workers lost the will to battle for their well-being. It took decades to get ourselves into this mess. It's going to take decades to get out of it. Fraser makes that all too clear in a book that deserves to spark a national conversation." ―
Michael Causey, Washington Independent Review of Books

"No one writing history today does it with the power, passion, insight, and rigor of Steve Fraser. In
The Age of Acquiescence, Fraser reaches back a century to the first Gilded Age and then pushes forward into our own Gilded Age, providing his readers with a history that matters, that informs, and that, most critically, raises essential questions we should all be asking about wealth, power, and inequalities in America today."―David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

"Steve Fraser is that rare writer who combines a deep knowledge of history with a penetrating analysis of our current political and social condition. Here, in the lively prose that marks all his writing, he probes the similarities and differences between America's two gilded ages - the late nineteenth-century and today - offering provocative observations about why the first produced massive popular resistance and the second resigned acquiescence."―
Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

"Over the last few years, there's been a wealth of books describing our new Gilded Age and bemoaning the extreme economic inequality that now defines modern America. Steve Fraser's fascinating
The Age of Acquiescence is indispensable because it explains how that happened, how America's long standing opposition to concentrated wealth was defeated. Steve Fraser, in other words, is Thomas Piketty with politics, providing a crucial guide in helping the ninety-nine percent understand the terms of their defeat and, more importantly, how it can once again go on the offensive."―Greg Grandin, author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World and Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

"A splendid and illuminating book. Fraser's writing is clear-headed and free of cant. I know of no better an accounting for the division of America over the last forty years into a minority of the terrified rich and a majority of the humiliated poor."―
Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham's Quarterly and author of Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration

"Steve Fraser has given us a sweeping account of the economic and cultural changes in American society that combined to create an earlier era of working class struggle and hope, and then in our present moment have generated quiescence and despair. Read this book for its synoptic account of the ways that cultural manipulation have accompanied intensifying economic exploitation. But read it also to snatch glimmers of a better future from the past."―
Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America

About the Author

Steve Fraser is the author of Every Man a Speculator, Wall Street, and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Award for the best book in labor history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Nation, the American Prospect, Raritan, and the London Review of Books. He has written for the online site Tomdispatch.com, and his work has appeared on the Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, and Alternet, among others. He lives in New York City.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; Edition Unstated (February 17, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316185434
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316185431
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.65 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 out of 5 stars 158

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
158 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2016
This book should be required reading, with classroom study, for every American. It only has one drawback: the vocabulary words are going to be tough slogging for some people. Sometimes it is definitely what they call college-level reading. Most of the time it is high school level and you might be able to guess your way through the tough spots. Read it on a Kindle and you can just touch the screen to highlight a word and a quick little pop-up tells you the dictionary definition and another pop-up gives you the first paragraph or maybe more of the Wikipedia article. And your done.

Another reviewer criticized what they called wordiness, but I disagree. Perhaps they were more objecting to the ten-dollar words? Some of the sentences were longish, but not to a fault. Personally, I love words, love language, love writing, love reading. Many writers have put me off with long winded sentences or paragraphs (I seem to be writing one right now, but oh well) but this book is a great pleasure to read.

Again, every American should read this book. Probably every human being should read this book.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2015
This book has a really important message in my opinion...having been born into FDRs world and then lived through the changes that came with Reagan and after him I could really relate to the points made in how our two gilded eras differ and why. I liked the book but if I can make one criticism it is that as the book gets closer to the end the prose gets awfully dense...sentences hard to decipher, allusions thick as thieves and so on, and an important message gets a bit blurred in the obscurity. Nevertheless I am glad I read it and I don't doubt I will read it again as I do with books that have a lot to say about the times I have lived in.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2015
I am in the midst of reading “The Age of Acquiescence”, the Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, by Steve Fraser.
I’m about half way through, having just finished reading chapter 8, “Back to the Future: The Political Economy of Auto-Cannibalism”. This is an astonishing, devastating, detailed account of how the financial sector over the past several decades has exploited, destroyed and consumed the capital of the industrial age which had accumulated of over a hundred years, turning it into obscene profits from themselves, while throwing millions of workers into unemployment and poverty and doing great harm to our commonwealth. The powerful elite have cannibalized their own nation and people.
As I belong to a retired generation who are in our eighties, many of us were able to avoid poverty and hope to be able to pay our expenses to the end without becoming a burden for our children. But we have been watching our children struggle and slide into a standard of living below ours. Worse yet, we fear that our beautiful grandchildren will be living on a subsistence income or even fall below the poverty level.
Now the hopeful thing about chapter 8 is that is gives a very detailed description of the biggest transfer of wealth from the middle and low income groups to the small powerful elites in all of human history. And if we can understand how it happened in the past decades, then we might be able to figure out how it can be reversed and corrected. It will not be easy as the elite have grown more powerful by hundreds of trillions of dollars in my generation & they will do everything in their power to keep their advantage and to expand it even more. As they have bought our elected officials with their campaign contributions etc. we have learned that we can’t expect much help from them.
How do we wake up those who vote against their own children’s future? I suppose to begin we must learn how to articulate the situation in ways that get their attention and are persuasive. For our own understanding I recommend that we continue to read and join progressive groups. Other than Fraser’s book I recommend for your reading “Killers of the Dream” by Lillian Smith and “The Price of Inequality” by Joseph Stieglitz.
Bo Stalcup
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Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2015
Five stars means you "loved" the book? No, I really hated it because it's an exhaustive analysis of the total failure of this country as a representative democracy. However that's always been the "myth" anyway and it's now clearer than ever that the emperor has no clothes, that we have always been a Republic ruled by the rich until, as during the Depression, they screwed up so bad in their greed, inhumanity, unenlightenment, and corruption that the govt.did rebel in the form of FDR and the New Deal. However that just started up again the inexorable engine of power & wealth to start the whole dismal thing all over again resulting in the Great Recession which has raised hardly any opposition and people are suffering all over but kept at bay by the need to survive and buying into the nightmare and like of the American Dream and the mollification of the American Standard of Living that just keeps people stupid.
This is a brilliantly written, exhausting, and totally depressing book and about 95% accurate in it's analysis of the dismal state of affairs in this country. But not to worry hardly anyone's going to read it and nothing will change, imagine (only 20 reviews here) when they're needs to be 5000, you got to be kidding me, see what I mean? So what difference will it make? Although it's infuriated me but I was already infuriated, anyone with a grain of sense living in this culture would be or should be but who has the time and energy to read a book like this, they're all staring mindlessly into their cell phones or trying out their latest app, and that's exactly the problem, not enough people are angry enough, or they're angry at so many things, different groups are angry for different reasons, so much so that America is a CIRCUS. But given the larger picture it's totally clear WTF is going on in this country but no one seems to care anymore. Everyone is either asleep, fat, dumb, and happy. Or scared, barely surviving, and powerless just how Big Business wants them to be. And no problem, if they rise up we can throw them in jail for disturbing the "peace." And Fraser does a comprehensive job of explaining why so many and so much is stifled to keep Capitalism going, and the bottom line is exactly that, MONEY and the haves and the have nots as Marx, Lenin, and even Hitler knew.
30 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Anh Tran Quoc
4.0 out of 5 stars well researched, important content but ...
Reviewed in Germany on September 16, 2021
... hard to read with lengthy lyric and many specific terminology.
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on January 6, 2017
turned out to be the perfect gift
One person found this helpful
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Peter L. Hurst
5.0 out of 5 stars An untold history of the United States
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2016
Steve Fraser is a labour historian of the USA and 'The Age of Acquiescence' is a lamentation on the silence/impotence of the modern American left in what he describes as the 'second gilded age' in America.

Fraser structures the book by comparing/contrasting the left of the modern era with the left of the last era when America had such vast inequalities - the so-called 'gilded age' of the late 19th century/early 20th century.

The first 'gilded age':-

Roughly starting from the civil war in the 1860s when America started to industrialise on a mass scale and ending with the great depression and FDR's 'New Deal' some 70 years later.

The  second gilded age:-

Reagan administration onwards - Fraser traces its antecedents in the likes of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon.

Fraser describes the contrast between the first gilded age, noted for an active and vocal left (Eugene Debs being a prominent example,) and our own 'gilded age,' the 'age of acquiescence,' as Fraser dubs it. Fraser illustrates the differences between the two era's of American history where inequalities have widened via a discussion of.....

A) Unemployment:-

'We have long since grown accustomed to treating unemployment as a normal and natural part of the economic order of things. But during a good part of the long nineteenth century, unemployment struck people as shocking, unnatural, and traumatic....“Unemployment” was not even invented as a census category until the 1870s'

B)  Ideas about social class and a putative 'class system' were also very different:-

'no matter how rich, influential, and self-involved in acts of conspicuous social preening members of our corporate and financial elite may be, we don’t seriously mistake them for real aristocrats. The whole idea of an actual aristocracy in the land of the free seems outlandish. That was not the case for those alive during the long nineteenth century. People like Howells were only two or three generations removed from the American Revolution. Memories of their ancestors’ war against monarchists and Tory aristocrats had been refreshed again and again...The specter of the aristocrat haunted the corridors of the nation’s political imagination for generations, so much so that at the end of the long nineteenth century Franklin Roosevelt could still inveigh with great energy and effect against “economic royalists” and “Tories of industry".....this apparent confusion—the conflation of the aristocrat and the capitalist—is a telltale sign of a political culture of resistance. It was invoked and reinvoked when people steeped in precapitalist ways of life first confronted the new order of things.'

Fraser describes our current age of acquiescence in America as sustained by:-

A) The 'fable of the businessman as populist hero':

'meritocracy, narrowly defined as “smartness,” served as social camouflage, an egalitarian façade concealing a single-minded fealty to the inexorable laws of the market....It was a parody of democracy. An insidious ideal, it degraded the egalitarian credo of earlier times, replacing it with devil-take-the-hindmost apologia for gross and growing inequality..... The transfiguration of moneymaking into a fearless quest for self-discovery and self-invention was married to a grander and older idealism about America as a “redeemer nation,"...Minus the oddball exception or two, the new tycoonery of the Age of Acquiescence, as Gordon Gekko reminds us, did not fancy itself an aristocracy.....Once upon a time, the lower orders aped the fashions and manners of their putative betters; now it’s the other way around.'

B) The Fable of consumerism - 'consumer culture cultivates a politics of style and identity focused on the rights and inner psychic freedom of the individual, one not comfortable with an older ethos of social rather than individual liberation.'

C) The Fable of the free agent - The enfeeblement of the trade union movement.

Fraser's book is as good a critique of American neo-liberalism as you are ever going to read. It’s a good answer as to why socialist ideas have struggled to gain traction in this, the ‘second gilded age.’ Fraser’s main point is that a certain brand of right wing populism has succeeded in ‘brainwashing’ (my word, not Fraser’s) the masses into believing that the kind of resistance and activism to vast inequalities in wealth and power, rising unemployment and weakening of worker’s rights prevalent in the ‘first gilded age’ is now somehow ‘un-American.’ The possibility of Trump as President has made this insightful and fascinating book essential reading for all interested in history and in politics. Trump's populism is evidently the continuation of a 40-50 year trend in right-wing American politics rather than the aberation it is sometimes characterised as.
Tanler
2.0 out of 5 stars A History of the American Economy
Reviewed in Canada on July 11, 2017
It's a tough book to rate. No doubt, Fraser has gone the extra mile in terms of research and information. He gives us a glorious account of the history of the labor movement in the United States beginning in the early nineteenth century. He discusses all manner of capitalism, i.e. industrial, financial, flexible, family, corporate, etc., with detailed explanations for each variety. It's very refreshing to read an account that is unabashedly pro-labor, that casts doubt on the absolute merits of a free market capitalist ethic. He covers a lot of territory, the expansion of the American economy into the 1960's, its subsequent decline thereafter (with all the ups and downs along the way). He also shows how consumerism and the trend towards personalization (marked by the advent of internet social media) has impacted our social consciousness. All this was very interesting reading. What drags the book down, however, is a writing style that I can only describe as bombastic and convoluted. He could have expressed the same thoughts in half the volume. He is repetitious, short on analysis and long on historical review. Is it a book worth reading? If you want to learn about the history of capitalism or the history of the American labor movement, yes. But be prepared to wade through some heavy and loquacious prose.
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Willow Arune
3.0 out of 5 stars A Caution for all
Reviewed in Canada on September 12, 2015
Good book but very dry.
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