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Daniel T. Rodgers

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Age of Fracture Paperback – September 3, 2012

by Daniel T. Rodgers (Author)

4.4 64 ratings

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In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel T. Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain.

Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves.

Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.

Review

“Age of Fracture is an extraordinary book―an engrossing story of the new age of markets, a new kind of history of ideas, traversing the frontiers between intellectual, political and public words, and a brilliant explanation of contemporary public life.”―Emma Rothschild, author of Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment

“With verve and fierce intelligence, Age of Fracture captures jagged truths about fluid thought, temporal upsets, and confrontations with fear. I could not put it down.”―Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White

“Rodgers ranges deftly and expertly from Judith Butler to Jerry Falwell, exploring the fragmentation of American social thought in every conceivable arena. Age of Fracture is an indispensable guide to where we have been, and where―if anywhere―we might be going.”―Jackson Lears, Editor, Raritan

“The most wide-ranging and ambitious interpretation of late-twentieth century American intellectual history available.”―James Kloppenberg, author of Reading Obama

“Rodgers offers a series of penetrating soundings into the social thought of the end of the twentieth century. He considers the recasting of terms in economic theory, the reconceptualizations of power in social theory, the attacks on "essentialism" in race and gender theory, and the diminished notions of obligation in political theory. Finally, he stresses our own curious encounters with the disaggregated past, via glib interpretations that impart an "increasingly malleable, flexible, and porous" quality to history...Again and again in the dominant modes of thought in these years, Rodgers finds institutions, identities, social bonds, and even history itself thinning out and coming apart.”―Robert Westbrook, Bookforum

“While Rodgers' narrative about the right is fascinating, none of it is terribly surprising: Defending the prerogatives of corporations and the wealthy, in new and novel ways, is what conservatives do. Age of Fracture provokes by showing that just as conservatives were marshaling their intellectual and philanthropic forces for what New Right gladiator Paul Weyrich called "a war of ideology...a war of ideas, it's a war about our way of life," liberals and progressives themselves "fractured" instead...Rodgers acknowledges both the long, shameful history of oppression as well as the thrilling cultural and political ferment that fractured the left into separate, sometimes warring mini-caucuses. But the book makes it clear that those fissures left liberalism without the ideology or rhetoric to combat the language of choice, markets and freedom that replaced social responsibility in the Reagan years.”―Joan Walsh, Salon

“Rodgers offers a challenging interdisciplinary overview of the last quarter of the 20th century...The great value of this book is that the major contentious issues of our time are discussed within a historic and intellectual framework...Rodgers's work may not enter the vernacular like David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, but it's a similarly seminal look at the way we live (and govern) now.”―Thomas A. Karel, Library Journal

“Rodgers has a knack for characterizing and assessing ideas without reducing them to their strictly polemical dimensions. But he also conveys the urgency and consequence of intellectual debate: the sense that it has stakes...Age of Fracture provides a frequently insightful narrative of recent public intellectual life in this country―and also some understanding of its precarious situation now.”―Scott McLemee, The National

“A blend of commentary and contextualization, admirably judicious. Rodgers is an excellent anatomist. His forte is clarity. Once in a while, he delivers himself of an opinion that seems positively clairvoyant.”―Alex Danchev, Times Higher Education

“I live in a different country than the one into which I was born in 1942. I have never been quite able to pinpoint exactly what makes it so different. More than any other book I've read in recent years, Age of Fracture, by the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers, has helped me to discover and to understand that difference...His ability to explain complex ideas―the Coase theorem comes to mind―is exemplary. He is unapologetic about treating intellectuals, and even academics, as producers of ideas worth taking seriously. He has the ability, unusual for historians of our day, to engage directly in current debates and to write with the clarity of a future observer of these same events. Intellectual history is never that easy to do. An intellectual history of our own time is even harder to pull off. Rodgers has done it and done it well. Perhaps, then, this book will have the happy effect of bringing to an end the trends it brings to light. Rodgers writes about our descent into thinking small because he wants us to once again think big―or so I read between his lines. If more thinkers wrote books like this, the country in which I live may once again resemble the one in which I was born. How sweet that would be.”―Alan Wolfe, New Republic online

“[An] important and well-written book...Age of Fracture helps us understand how the recent past set the terms for our current attempts to see society whole and conceive of an agenda for its future...[Rodgers] is a master of his craft; and this book, in which he takes history into the near present, shows what this mastery looks like in practice...Rodgers's diagnostic survey of the most local and recent turn in the modern cycle of integration and disaggregation is essential reading for thinking about what is to come.”―Samuel Moyn, Dissent

“In The Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers offers an elegant, often eloquent, history of intellectual life in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”―Lisa Szefel, History News Network

“Age of Fracture dazzles as it moves from cultural history to political philosophy, Michel Foucault to John Rawls.”―John T. McGreevy, Commonweal

“It is hard to think of a work of American intellectual history, written in the last quarter of a century, that is more accomplished or more likely to remain permanently influential.”―Michael O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement

“An evocative meditation on the last 25 years of the 20th century…Rodgers describes the sources driving the dissolution of an overarching American ideal…Speaks in heart-rending ways to our current world.”―Jonathan Holloway, Chronicle of Higher Education

About the Author

Daniel T. Rodgers is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University.

Print length

360 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Publication date

September 3, 2012
Dimensions

6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

0674064364
ISBN-13

978-0674064362
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press (September 3, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674064364
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674064362
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #132,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #715 in Historical Study (Books)
- #2,867 in United States History (Books)

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4.4 64 ratings

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George Cotkin

A Synthesis of Divisions

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2010

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This book is a bravura work of intellectual history that will be of great interest to specialists in the field but also accessible to general readers. It covers the period from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century (with an epilogue dealing with post 9/11 America). Rodgers sees this time frame as marking a significant break with the past; the period became defined by fracture - old presumptions, modes of identity and consensus fell quickly. In their stead were vociferous debates about many issues - race, economic theory, power, and more that had, only recently been settled, at least in the minds of many intellectuals. The economic crisis of the 1950s in large part set the stage for reconsiderations of the familiar, and the rise of the Reagan revolution brought fractures into full view. With consensus a myth (although still a powerful one at least in aspects of Reagan's oratory), the era's thought and politics exploded with new views. Rather than quiet debate, the clamor fed into a hardening of the arteries of discourse which helped birth the present era of punditry and partisanship.
The fracturing of American thought and culture, as presented by Rodgers, energized in many ways the conversation of intellectuals. Some concepts quickly led to dead ends, others blossomed into new ways of thinking about markets or identity or gender. Rodgers is quite interesting, for instance, when he ties the cultural wars to gender concerns. And he is quite strong, too, on economic theory, which he manages to present with both depth and accessibility. And the sweep of his knowledge and eye for the telling quote is impressive.
Rodgers has, perhaps paradoxically, managed to produce a synthesis for an age of fracture. Yet he demonstrates how various theories cut across disciplinary lines in quick and devastating fashion. Hence, maybe more attention would have been welcome to how newly developing lines of communication allowed a fractured culture to be hemmed together, albeit in a manner bound to unravel.

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E. J. Hillard

Age of fracture - first impressions

Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2011

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Rodgers comes with plenty of credentials as a historian so this book could be assumed to (and does) have a sound foundation in historical facts, nicely incorporated with references that don't disturb the flow of the narrative. And a complex narrative it is of how the self has come to be redefined in the last thirty years from an entity that fit within various supportive social and economic circles and found comfort there to the freewheeling individual assumed by current libertarians, often a barely viable financial unit though with the visions of and identity with millionaires, even billionaires. Rodgers takes you through this line of argument from the perspectives of modern markets and power structures, as well as from race and gender. It is a book that challenges the reader starting with challenges to his/her ability to follow the discussion, one not to be read while trying to get to sleep. In my opinion Rodgers book is complementary to Robert Pippin's "Hollywood Westerns and American Myth" for the way it seeks to explain how, correctly or not, Americans increasingly seem to define themselves less from empirical circumstances and more from the myths and fantasies they encounter in their lives whether derived from entertainment or from political leaders. No wonder there is current, renewed interest in the novels and thinking (if it can be called that) of Ayn Rand.

2 people found this helpful

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Neilah Desiree

Makes you think!

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2015

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I took notes and thought about this book for a long time. It is very interesting and has many points of view. I am impressed. However, I have a positive outlook about the world and this book did not support what I would like to think. I hope it is represents an unbalanced more than biased view. I am waiting a while and I am going to read it again. It challenged what I thought I knew about economics, politics and philosophy, with lots of reference material I have never read. I love a challenge.

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Fifthbeatle

The term "Neoliberalism" has become such a commonplace as almost ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2015

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The term "Neoliberalism" has become such a commonplace as almost to be devoid of meaning. But if you want to understand how we got from "there" to "here," and to understand the intellectual and social main currents that have led to the present moment of neo-liberal ascendancy--YOU MUST READ THIS book! Rodgers has done it again! I have been reading his work since the early 1980's. He is always interesting, incisive and informative. And he really does his homework. Again: if you have any desirte to understand the Historical "now," you must read this extraordinary, indispensable book!

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