If crises change the way we see the world, the Great Recession of 2008-10 has to be reckoned, so far, as an anomaly. It has upended lives, set loose a storm of fears and anxieties, fueled a conservative insurrection in American politics, and shaken economic institutions on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. But in comparison with earlier economic crackups, this crisis has packed an emotional wallop but only an intellectual whimper.
By contrast, Depression-era America was awash in ideas and visions of social change. Many of the concepts that came to the fore in those years went on to shape social thought for decades: Keynes’s macroeconomic theories, new conceptions of mass society and social character, and a bold sense of the state’s obligation to maintain general welfare. Social visions expanded as the economic collapse swept millions of personal fates into one. Even before the New Deal took shape, Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the “watchword of this age” was our collective “interdependence” on one another.
The economic crisis of the 1930s lasted longer, ran deeper, and left far more extensive economic damage in its wake than the current recession. In its bank failures, its liquidation of middle-class savings, and its armies of the jobless, the Great Depression was a striking lesson in interdependence: the dependence of farmers on urban purchasers, the reliance of businesses on the consumer spending of workers, the need for new forms of labor solidarity.
The institutional failures of 2008-10 did bring the economy closer to the brink of structural breakdown than any of the post-World War II downturns that preceded it. In its cascading economic effects and institutional failures, the Great Recession, too, has offered a harrowing lesson in interdependence. Yet the movement in ideas has been barely discernible.
The reason may lie less in the crises themselves than in the prevailing visions of self and society into which they erupted. For all the aura of hedonistic individualism that clusters around images of pre-1929 America, the early 20th century was in fact a time of wide-ranging social thought. Notions of the self-made man and the laissez-faire economy gave way to a recognition of collectively entangled lives in an urban and industrial age. In politics and academic life, the concept of “society” took on more depth and meaning. These were the years in which the sociological survey was invented and sociology took shape as a discipline; the years when economics turned institutionalist and interest-group realism took hold in political science; when Charles Beard helped invent modern social history; and when the modern social novel was born at the hands of realist writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton.
The long Progressive Era was not without its flaws: its moralizing, its accommodation to empire, and its tightening racial segregation, as well as its naïve faith in expert knowledge. But this was also a time when the “social question” was taken seriously, when what was called “the public good” was pursued—inventively and without embarrassment.
The Great Depression ignited a serious discussion about society and the common good. The economic crisis of our own time, by contrast, erupted into a radically different—and shrunken—world of ideas.
A sense of common purposes and socially entangled lives had been sustained through the cold war and the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
But then, in the last quarter of the 20th century, the conversation about society’s fate and welfare began to break apart into fragmented concepts and language. Economics led the way. Shaken by the stagflation of the 1970s, Keynesian macroeconomics fell sharply in prestige. The models that slipped into its place no longer began, as Keynes’s had, with systemwide economic characteristics: aggregate savings and demand, liquidity traps and preference functions, and the rest. Instead the hottest economic-model-making now began on micro foundations. To understand systemwide effects, it was argued, one needed to start with the behavior of individual economic actors: bargaining, calculating, advantage-seeking, and preference-satisfying. “All economics is micro": Peggy Noonan heard the news as far away as President Reagan’s speechwriting office. A decade later, the effects of economics’ turn toward choice-making rational actors were racing through political science and sociology.
One of the most striking consequences of the shift from systems to choice was the way in which thought experiments based on the calculations of two socially isolated, individual advantage-takers suddenly took hold throughout the social sciences. Ronald Coase framed his Nobel-winning theorem for allocating the costs of pollution and other social damages by showing how two neighboring property owners would, on their own, work out the cost problem. Charles Murray’s influential broadside attack on public assistance for the poor, Losing Ground (1984), clinched its argument by asking readers to simplify the macro issues of justice and poverty and put themselves in the place of two isolated individuals—Harold and Phyllis, he called them—as they weighed the advantages of going to work or going on welfare.
A different pair of socially isolated choice makers framed a game-theory classic, the prisoner’s dilemma, which morphed into a basic thinking tool in the social sciences. In affirmative-action debates over the claims of two individuals to one spot in a medical school or to a firefighter’s job, debates over racial justice that had once run broadly across history, institutions, and society were reduced to questions of individual claim and choice. Such condensations were not the only tools of the social sciences in the last quarter of the 20th century, of course; but models based on isolated choice-making actors were one of late-20th-century social sciences’ most novel and contagious productions.
The trend in the post-1970s humanities, although it took a less reductionist course, has important parallels with the postsocial turn in the social sciences. A linguistic structuralism of sorts flowed from Paris into American literature departments. But even as texts lost authors, and the term “I” lost meaning, the patterns of language could be disrupted and brought to a momentary pause, it was said, by the gifted poststructuralist reader. In the postmodern arts, “disruption,” “fluidity,” “improvisation,” “impermanency,” and “pastiche” were the watchwords of the new forms. In graduate history seminars, students learned to ask where human “agency” and individual efficacy were to be found in past events, and to turn skeptically from social-history narratives that downplayed them.
There were powerful countercritiques, of course, from Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, and others. On the intellectual right, conservative critics of postmodernism argued that it was a screen to obscure a politics of group and identity consciousness that had all but snuffed out independent thought.
In fact, the striking development involved the ways in which identity itself was destabilized. The definition of “woman"—invoked by 1970s feminists—fractured along lines of race, sexuality, politics, and values. Leading scholars of race began to signal its malleable and socially constructed nature by surrounding “race” with quotation marks. Multiracialism’s advocates lobbied for the option of checking off more than one box in the census categories. This was not the economists’ world of choice but had striking affinities with it. At the cutting edge of the humanities, theorists wrote about identities as plural and overlapping, as “multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory,” as “fragmented and decentered.” Identity was a hybrid, they told us: strategic, disruptable, and elective.
Words and visions for common and interdependent fates had fractured. Across the multiple fronts of intellectual debate, concepts of human nature that had been thick with context, social circumstance, and history gave way to an understanding that emphasized choice, agency, performance, language, and desire. Ability to imagine spheres of collective solidarity—class, neighborhood, or the common good—shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out in favor of self-acting markets and worlds of choice. The drag of history persisted, of course. The pressure of social forces on choice was no less weighty than before. But the concepts that might have helped to hold them clearly in mind had disaggregated.
Like all powerful forms of analysis, the stripped-down, actor-centered terms and models that came to dominate the Age of Fracture accomplished important intellectual work. They often liberated. But they produced an intellectual culture incapable of responding imaginatively to the recent crisis that has once more thrust our economic fates together. In the absence of stronger concepts of collective society than market choice and fluid identities, the economic crackup has disrupted our lives, but it does not ignite our social imaginations or generate new ways out of our problems.
Economists are quicker now to qualify the claims of efficient market theory, but the core of economic science has not been seriously rattled. The Obama administration struggles not only to translate its “Yes, we can” slogan into practical policy but, more important, to make the word “we” tangible and meaningful. Meanwhile, the opposition retreats to old-fashioned visions of smaller government, entrepreneurial freedom, and economic individualism.
The economic interdependence of our lives needs, but has yet to find, new avenues of expression. There is more talk of parts than of bonds and social connections. There is more fear than intellectual ferment, more anguish than attempts to rethink our practices and values. Issues of income equity and social justice have found only weak expression. The public good has become a thin and pale expression, when it isn’t dismissed altogether as a fiction.
To deal adequately with our present moment, we will have to wrestle with the past: with the past quarter-century’s arguments and evasions, its shrunken purposes and diminished collective meanings. Its fractures still cast their shadow over us.
