The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

by Steve Fraser Narrated by Pete Larkin

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Fascinating."—NaomiKlein, New York Times BookReview (Editor's Choice)

"Fraser longs for the passion and force with which Americans of earlier generations attacked aggregated power."
—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

"Provocative....A perceptive reading of the current zeitgeist."—MichaelKazin, 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

"Fraser is our preeminent historian of America as a capitalist civilization. No one is more attuned to the inner vibrations of our monied culture...[he writes] a prose of sinuous beauty."—Corey Robin, Salon

"Fraser is particularly passionate and penetrating in his analysis of our present state of submission and surrender."—JonWiener, Los Angeles Times

Kirkus Reviews

2014-12-07
Working men and women died for the eight-hour workday, and the thanks they get is the silence of lambs. It wasn't long ago, writes labor historian Fraser (Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life, 2005, etc.), that "the labor question" was a matter of incendiary discussion. The 19th century saw countless efforts, for instance, to create a balance of industrial and agricultural enterprise, many of them based on a post-Jeffersonian notion of empowered freeholders and independent producers. The market economy that emerged instead was likely to beget inequality and poverty, before "the antiseptic, mathematical language of risk assessment and probability analysis made that seem overly sentimental." Taking his narrative through the Jeffersonian era and the first Gilded Age to the present, Fraser charts a steady diminution of workers' rights and the value of labor. He can be a little heavy-handed, especially when pillorying Ronald Reagan: "the Great Communicator's reign…unleashed torrents of mercenary greed." Some readers may find this off-putting, but others, used to a diet of Chris Hedges, may well find it exhilarating instead. Fraser's careful analysis of the rise of the "rentier society" of that time helps make up for rhetorical excess, and especially useful is his look at how the anti-usury laws of old gave way to a time of financial deregulation, which allowed for an all-out assault on the wallets of those who lived on credit. And surely Fraser is right when he notes the damaging effects of false consciousness, as when even the labor movement insists on being seen as representing the middle class "in a studied aversion to using a social category—the working class—that fits it well but is now so stigmatized that it is better left buried." A welcome though overly broad-brushed excoriation of the age of the ascendant 1 percent.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170147458
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	02/17/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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