A New Consensus?
A New Consensus?
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新共识？
DOI：
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发表时间：
2011
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Daniel T. Rodgers
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作者：
Daniel T. Rodgers
当人们问我是做什么的时候，我有时会说我的职业是寻找美国。当然，这是一个愚蠢的回答。愚蠢，因为美国就在我身边，不可避免地和不可避免地。但也很愚蠢，因为“它”永远找不到。美国是一个论点：一个巨大的，众多的，往往是矛盾的混合物的人，经验，愿望，和异议。与美国历史上的任何其他时代一样，这个分裂的时代充满了争论和矛盾。正如Melani McAlister提醒我们的那样，社会哲学家作品中流失的力量可以在电影中戏剧性地重新集中起来。正如Michael Kimmage所写的那样，那些写下他们对民族国家的深深不信任的保守派知识分子与新的国家伟大的先驱坐在同一个政党里。正如唐纳德·克里奇洛（Donald Critchlow）所指出的那样，联邦首脑们向米尔顿·弗里德曼（Milton Friedman）致敬荣誉，尽管在保罗·沃尔克（Paul Volcker）对弗里德曼在整个20世纪70年代所倡导的货币增长规则进行实验之后，他们中没有人真的再次尝试。在这一时期进行的民意调查显示，既有惊人的趋同模式，也有惊人的分裂模式，这种差异往往是由措辞上的微小变化引起的。如果共识历史意味着一种历史叙述，它使其主题同质化，或者漂白了争论、利益和冲突的持续、深刻的推拉，我希望《断裂的时代》不会被视为预示着共识历史的复兴。但即使是激烈的争论也是在框架内进行的。现实的某些部分成为焦点，吸引了人们的注意力;其他部分则被边缘化;有些则完全从辩论中消失。我在《断裂的年代》中试图展示的是这些框架转变的方式--当然不是对每个人，而是对许多人，特别是那些认为自己塑造了全国性辩论的人。这不是一个关于左翼和右翼同质化的争论，而是关于假设可以跨越党派界限的速度以及它们之间意想不到的共性。因此，我试图强调的不是社会的分裂，不是共识的破裂，也不是知识分子对右翼或左翼的日益困惑，而是社会语言和想象力分裂成更小、更个人主义的分析单位。空气中弥漫着大量的民族主义，但没有新税收的民族主义很难成为西奥多罗斯福所说的国家伟大。电影中有结构，但社会科学中的结构主义言论要少得多。自由主义情绪蓬勃发展。关于流动市场和流动身份的讨论渗透到了新的领域。我的意思不是说《断裂的年代》是对冷战社会思想和文化逝去的哀悼。大部分都消失了，而且很好地摆脱了。但是，理查德·霍夫施塔特的《美国政治传统》，他的“共识”历史中写得最精彩的一本，也不是对过去的哀叹。如果从日常政治的噪音和愤怒中退一步，并试图认真对待不断变化的争论框架，那么《断裂时代》就与20世纪50年代的社会批评家们站在一起，而不相信他们的观点。
hen people ask me what I do, I sometimes say that I have spent my career looking for America. It is a silly answer, of course. Silly, because America is all around me, inescapably and insistently. But silly, also, because “it” is never to be found. America is an argument: a big, multitudinous, often contradictory amalgam of persons, experiences, aspirations, and dissents. The age of fracture was as full of argument and contradiction as any other era in American history. The power that drained out of the works of social philosophers could be found dramatically reconcentrated in the movies, as Melani McAlister reminds us. The conservative intellectuals who wrote of their deep distrust of the nation-state sat in the same party as the heralds of a new national greatness, as Michael Kimmage writes. Federal Reserve heads paid honor to Milton Friedman, as Donald Critchlow notes, though after Paul Volcker’s experiment with the money-growth rule that Friedman had championed all through the 1970s, none of them actually tried it again. Public opinion polls throughout the period show both striking patterns of convergence and striking patterns of division, the difference often triggered by modest shifts in wording. If consensus history means a historical account that homogenizes its subject or bleaches out the constant, deeply serious push and pull of arguments, interests, and conflicts, I hope Age of Fracture will not be taken as heralding a consensus history revival. But even intense arguments operate within frames. Certain parts of reality come into focus and rivet attention; others are edged to the side; some fall out of debate altogether. What I have tried to show in Age of Fracture are the ways in which those frames shifted—not for everyone, of course, but for many and particularly for those who thought of themselves as shaping the national debate. It is not an argument about the homogenization of Left and Right, but about the quickness with which assumptions could move across partisan boundaries and the unexpected commonalities among them. What I have tried to highlight, then, is not the fracturing of society, or a breakdown of consensus, or a growing confusion on either the intellectual Right or Left, but a fracturing of social language and imaginations into smaller and more individualistic units of analysis. There was plenty of nationalism in the air, but a nationalism with no new taxes was hardly what Theodore Roosevelt meant by national greatness. There were structures in the movies, but far less structuralist talk in the social sciences. Libertarian sentiments flourished. Talk of fluid markets and fluid identities filtered into new places. I did not mean Age of Fracture as a lament for the passing of Cold War social thought and culture. Much of that is gone and with good riddance. But neither did Richard Hofstadter mean The American Political Tradition, the most brilliantly written of his “consensus” histories, to be a lament for the past. If stepping back from the noise and furor that is everyday politics and trying to take seriously the shifting frames of argument puts Age of Fracture in the company of 1950s social critics without buying into their assump