In Need of Repair   /   Fall 2024   /    Thematic: In Need of Repair

The Age of the Average

And What Its Loss May Mean for the Future of Democracy

Olivier Zunz

THR illustration; Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photos.

At a symposium marking the two hundredth anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the philosopher Richard Rorty delivered an address titled “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” Rorty began by quoting Jefferson on toleration: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods or no God” (Notes on the State of Virginia). Rorty went on to argue that democratic citizens, following this example, should be willing to reconsider “matters of ultimate importance” that give “sense and point to their lives” when their “opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.”11xRichard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 175.

There is much to ponder here now that we are living through a time when “hanging together” as Americans is proving to be a huge challenge.22xJohn Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, ed. Carl Guarneri (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Elements of paralyzing discord surround us, and the journalistic conceit of a divided “red” and “blue” America has become a widely acknowledged reality. I want here to draw a contrast between these days of intense discord and division and another time—roughly the twenty years following World War II—when Americans of different political persuasions, who had fought together against totalitarianism, raised “consensus” to the pantheon of national values. It was in this period that Americans talked most about consensus as both a desirable and practicable ideal, and they continued to do so well into the 1960s, when confidence in that ideal (or what might even be described as consensus about the value of consensus) began to unravel until its complete disappearance now. I am not suggesting we should revive this consensus, if only because it was masking too many inequities. But the postwar years stand in such sharp contrast with our current deep dividedness that it is important to understand a distinctive feature of a world we have lost before turning to some of our challenges.

Defining This Lost Moment

I call this lost moment the age of the average in large part to contrast it with our “age of fracture.”33xDaniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). How did we reach the age of the average, and what did it mean for American democracy? When we invoke the average, we often think of compromise, conformity, even mediocrity, but I do not mean this at all. I want to retrace how, not so long ago, in this age of the average, an increasingly educated citizenry invested in multiple communities of inquiry. Are we capable of doing the same in our disunity—and also under a new scientific paradigm?

The age of the average emerged from the engineering of high mass consumption during the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, when tinkerers in industry joined forces with scientists to develop new products and markets. The division of labor between them became irrelevant as industrial innovation rested on advances in organic chemistry, the physics of electricity, and thermodynamics.44xOlivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7. Working together, these industrial engineers and managers created the modern mass market that penetrated all segments of society from the middle out. Thus, in the heyday of the Gilded Age, at the height of the inequality pitting robber barons against the “common man,” was born, unannounced but increasingly present, the “average American.” It is in searching for the average consumer that American business managers at the time drew a composite portrait of an imagined individual. Here was a person nobody ever met or knew, merely a statistical conceit, who nonetheless felt real.

This new character was not uniquely American. Forces at work in America were also operative in Europe, albeit to a lesser degree. Thus, Austrian novelist Robert Musil, who died in 1942, reflected on the average man in his unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. In the middle of his narrative, Musil paused for a moment to give a definition of the word average: “What each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average [is] a ‘something,’ but nobody knows exactly what…. the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average of what is basically meaningless” but “[depending] on [the] law of large numbers.”55xRobert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York, NY: Vintage International, 1996), 532. This, I think, is a powerful definition of the American social norm in the “age of the average”: a meaningless something made real, or seemingly real, by virtue of its repetition. Economists called this average person the “representative individual” in their models of the market.66xPaul A. Samuelson, “Welfare Economics and International Trade,” The American Economic Review 28, no. 2 (1938): 261.  Their complex simplification became an agreed-upon norm, at once a measure of performance and an attainable goal. It was not intended to suggest that all people are alike. As William James once approvingly quoted an acquaintance of his, “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.”77xWilliam James, “The Importance of Individuals,” in The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 256–57. And that remained true in the age of the average.

Majority and average converged in the prosperous postwar years when Americans not only produced most of the goods sold in the world but also lent money to other countries rebuilding their economies to purchase them. Economist W.W. Rostow, President Johnson’s adviser, was perhaps the most articulate voice describing high mass consumption as a new stage in American life.88xW.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Being a consumer in the mass market became the sign or indicator of entry into the broad American middle class and participation in its benefits. It was a case of organization and ideas converging on American soil to the point at which a feeling of general abundance blinded too many Americans to deep inequities in their midst.

There were, of course, doubters. When I entered graduate school in history in the late 1960s, historians questioning this notion were busy poring over old censuses and other quantitative records to measure the true extent of social mobility ordinary Americans had experienced over time. Was it illusory or was it real? They questioned the assumption that American prosperity was easily attainable and shared. But they did not find what they wanted. In a flurry of “mobility studies” tracing the careers of thousands of ordinary Americans from one manuscript door-to-door census enumeration to the next, historians proved that upward mobility had never been as easy as political rhetoric claimed, but they could not deny it either.99xAfter the pioneering work of Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). However small the individual increments, climbing into the middle class was real. Americans saw social mobility as a reliable mechanism for enlarging the ranks of the broad middle. Ordinary people expected financial gains, and many experienced them. Intergenerational mobility was common. Failure was often temporary, and geographic mobility offered those willing to relocate a second chance. In short, abundance helped produce the American consensus.

Political theorist James Burnham was one of the first to identify the cause of the economic transformation as “the managerial revolution” in a 1941 book of the same name. There he posited that administrators, executives, superintendents, engineers, and bureau heads came to assume a “peculiar importance” in directing and coordinating the multifarious factors of production and distribution, so that materials, machines, plants, workers, and foremen were available in their proper quantity and time.1010xJames Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (London, England: Lume Books, 2021), 73. First published 1941. But it was only in the 1970s that historian Alfred Chandler Jr., from his influential position at the Harvard Business School, offered an in depth analysis of how the “visible hand” of corporate managers had, through stages he identified, replaced the previously “invisible hand” of the market.1111xAlfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977). Railroad managers were pioneers in accounting techniques. With vertical integration, managers in steel, oil, and electricity then came to exercise full control over both the production and the distribution of goods—from the procurement of raw material to the delivery of finished goods in the hands of the consumer. Their reach, already commanding during the Gilded Age, survived the challenges of market fluctuations and of oversight from both the courts and the regulatory state. Managers claimed full victory in the postwar period, when policymakers routinely embraced neo-Keynesian policies of pump priming to strengthen purchasing power when needed.

Chandler’s important work and that of his students was based mostly on flow charts and analysis of organizational structures. I turned to social history to give their story a human face and gain a sense of its consequences for daily life. In my own Making America Corporate (1990), a collective biography of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century corporate managers and office workers, I drew portraits of the men and women whose jobs it was to organize new work hierarchies and generate the production and consumption of goods reaching the market in ever-greater numbers. I hoped this foray into social history would personalize this impersonal transformation and give a more granular sense of its consequences. Prominent among the latter was my finding that the people we believed were subject to a strict corporate hierarchy or victims of repetitive tasks—or indeed both—actually had significant agency. A new middle class came to encompass a whole gamut of occupations. In the formative years of corporate capitalism, middle-level managers, engineers, white-collar employees, salesmen, and other representatives of growing corporations resolved conflicts arising from their multiple loyalties to employers, independent professional organizations, and community associations by defining a new work culture.1212xOlivier Zunz, Making America Corporate (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Market management had consequences for the entire American social structure. Managers wanted to enlarge the broad center of consumers. At the same time, they meant to understand the distinct groups the market should recognize—according to income, taste, gender, and a few other criteria—to improve the targeting of their products. In People of Plenty (1954), a short, brilliant analysis of American society, historian David Potter described the new class structure created by the managerial revolution. He argued that if the American class structure was “in reality very unlike the classless society which we imagine, it [was] equally unlike the formalized class societies of former times, and thus it should be regarded as a new kind of social structure in which the strata may be fully demarked but where the bases of demarcation are relatively intangible.”1313xDavid Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 102. Why intangible? Because one could climb or go down a notch on the ladder of consumption without changing the overall convergence toward the average of a broad middle class.

Income differences narrowed significantly. Influential economist Simon Kuznets, who established principles of national accounting and historical series of inequality measures, argued in his American Economic Association presidential address in 1954 that the advanced phase of industrial development, after an initial period of increased inequality, led to a reduction in inequality.1414xSimon Kuznets published the address as “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” The American Economic Review 45, no. 1 (1955): 1–28.

Consumption grew. The theory behind the Kuznets curve added fuel to the widespread belief that more disposable income created an increasingly large middle class of consumers. The American population distributed by income had come to resemble the bell-shaped curve of a Gaussian distribution, with the majority massing around the average and the very rich and the very poor as outliers. Most simply put, with a bulging middle class, majority and average were finally converging.

This simple fact of convergence led to a conceptual change of magnitude among Americans across divides of class and race. United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther acted on it by pushing through his famous “Treaty of Detroit,” with auto manufacturers assuring huge financial gains for autoworkers.1515xNelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995). Even Martin Luther King Jr. embraced consumerism as a weapon in the fight for integration. In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King argued, “People must be made consumers by one method or the other.”1616xMartin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2010),172–73. First published in 1967. Once “transformed into purchasers, Negroes...will have a greater effect on discrimination” with “cash to use in their struggle.” More people feeling the tangible effect of belonging to a broad middle class could become more tolerant of one another and negotiate ideological and religious differences.

Hence convergence in politics appeared more frequently, and conversation across the aisle ensued in ways unthinkable today. Controversies certainly abounded, but historian Arthur Schlesinger could write meaningfully about a “vital center.”1717xArthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949). He argued that the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower was the epitome of the American consensus because it marked the permanent acceptance by “the Republican party, as the party of conservatism,” of “the changes wrought in the American scene by a generation of liberal reform.” In Ike’s own words, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” Ike disliked the idea of “partisanship”; he resisted that of “special interest.” In historian James Patterson’s judgment, the two presidential candidates of 1952—Eisenhower’s opponent was Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson—resembled each other. Ike “shrank from involving the presidency in controversial questions. Better, he thought, to stand above the battle and in so doing preserve his political standing. ‘Partisanship,’ moreover, was to Ike a word every bit as dirty as ‘special interest.’” Stevenson “did not differ greatly from Eisenhower. He was an ardent Cold Warrior. He opposed public housing and was ambivalent about repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. He castigated ‘socialized medicine.’” As social critic Irving Howe summed it up, “‘Adlaism’ was ‘Ikeism’...with a touch of literacy and intelligence.”1818xJames T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996), 253, 272.

To describe the cumulative effect of these changes on the American psyche, sociologist Daniel Bell (over-)confidently predicted “the end of ideology.” “Old goals have been displaced,” Bell wrote in 1960, “and the American Dream has been given a new gloss.” Witness the autoworker, he wrote, “the seedling of the indigenous class-conscious radical” has grown into a consumer “working toward a ‘nice little modern house.’”1919xDaniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 246–47. The new left would later accuse Walter Reuther of having negotiated a Faustian bargain with capital. Feminists rebelled as well. Betty Friedan hated that “thing ridden house” turned into “the end of life in itself.”2020xBetty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1963), 232.

But Vice President Richard Nixon was oblivious to feminists’ calls when heralding the “house” and consumer products, which Friedan so despised, as symbols of American prosperity and freedom. Nixon in 1959 promoted the consumer ideology when confronting Khrushchev in the famous “kitchen debate” at Sokolniki Park, near Moscow, in a ranch house Americans had built for displaying to the Russians the benefits the American household enjoyed. In so doing, Nixon was turning consumer culture into an export product. The American middle class of consumers was the new universal class, not the working class of the Marxists reduced to silence on American soil. As German economist Werner Sombart had predicted much earlier in the century, “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, all socialist utopias came to nothing.”2121xWerner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, trans. P. Hocking and C.T. Husbands (London, England: MacMillan, 1986), 106.

The Innovative Citizen

Historians often describe the age of the average as one of excessive conformity amid self-congratulation. There was also plenty of innovation. Historian Richard Hofstadter captured both trends in his classic The Age of Reform (1955) when remarking, tongue in cheek, that America was “the only country born perfect that aspired to progress.”2222xRichard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 36. “Progress” in knowledge could be seen in the vast expansion of a science-based economy aimed at servicing the average. Forces that created the age of high mass consumption also transformed our knowledge economy. Mass consumption depended on the ongoing creation of new products. Developing this point in full in Why the American Century? I commented upon the decline of the lone inventor and the rapid rise of creativity within a matrix of inquiry. This creativity found its best expression through a network of new institutions of knowledge committed to a science-based consumer economy that transformed natural resources into mass-produced goods available to the growing market of averaged Americans.

As part of the early twentieth-century Progressive Movement against the prevailing concentration of wealth, philosopher John Dewey promoted a spirit of inquiry to advance democracy. Dewey pushed relentlessly for an innovative citizen involved in the task of inquiry. Dewey first presented his ideas on inquiry and democracy in How We Think (1910). Dewey wanted to reconcile the time-honored tradition of tinkering with the newer and more rigorous methods of science. He attempted somehow to combine in the same vision for science a task-oriented pragmatism and the pursuit of “highly specialized ends.” He wanted to see citizens “adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific.”2323xJohn Dewey, How We Think (Boston, MA: D.C. Heath & Co., 1910), preface.

Dewey’s understanding of science was met with skepticism in highbrow circles. As British philosopher Bertrand Russell argued, Dewey wrongly focused on the spirit of “inquiry” rather than “a search for truth.” Russell went on to ridicule Dewey, who presumably could not see the difference between a scientist and a bricklayer. It was a petty swipe, but Russell had a point in arguing that Dewey’s pragmatism was “in harmony with the age of industrialism and collective enterprise” and naturally “his strongest appeal should be to Americans.”2424xBertrand Russell, “Dewey’s New Logic,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosophers, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951), 135–56. First published in 1923. As a matter of fact, American business managers, scientists, and the military were cooperating in a matrix of related institutions of inquiry that would only expand under the pressures of market imperatives and serve what seemed to be an endlessly growing number of takers. The American research university grew in tandem with corporate research.2525xZunz, Why the American Century? All of this underwrote a soul-searching quest for a creative relationship between basic and applied science, with the goal of satisfying the wants and needs of the average American. After World War II, engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush proclaimed science the “endless frontier” when proposing the federal government fund a National Science Foundation.2626xVannevar Bush and United States Office of Scientific Research and Development, The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1945). If Bush’s idea for the new foundation’s program was basic science, the need for multiple applications soon became explicit, reflecting, as political scientist Donald Stokes put it, “a broad awareness of how deeply modern science is inspired by societal need.”2727xDonald E. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 111.

Dewey also called for “[finding] some unity” in research and “some principle that makes for simplification.”2828xDewey, How We Think, preface. One common denominator across developing and emerging fields of inquiry was an emphasis on quantification. In the age of the average, American investigators invested heavily in statistical analysis. Social scientists pushed for empirical research in large university departments. They moved away from their late-nineteenth-century roots in the Social Gospel movement and invested in the science of quantitative measurement. They sought to understand society both at its broad center and at all its strata—how the parts differed, were alike, or combined. The methods and mindset developed initially in the rarefied scientific world of nineteenth-century Belgian pioneering statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who invented “l’homme moyen,” and quantification-mad positivists such as Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte came fully into their own in this American moment, with social statistics becoming a regnant science. The American mathematical community followed suit with significant advances in probability sampling and all other forms of measurement. There was immense creativity invested in the measurement of society.2929xSee Karen Hunger Parshall, The New Era in American Mathematics, 1920–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022); David Nirenberg and Ricardo L. Nirenberg, Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Ricardo L. Nirenberg (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

So long as average and majority overlapped, the average, however reductive a notion it was in important ways, became an easy reference point most Americans could relate to. Americans invested faith in an easy-to-join broad center. The feeling of being in the range of the average promoted a sense of unity among otherwise diverse people. When it came to inquiry, Americans approached the task in terms close to those that John Dewey codified. To do so, they built “a skein of networks” and somehow made it work for the common good.3030xBruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 120. Bertrand Russell’s snub notwithstanding, individuals could feel a sense of agency in embracing pragmatism by navigating in the broad matrix where “ordinary” Americans could do “extra-ordinary” things.

The End of the Age

This is a world we have largely lost, and, although it may seem contrary to the spirit of my reflections so far, I do not regret it. The statistical management of society is still very much with us. We continue to live with mass consumption, an abundance of data on everything, a world of statistics and surveys. We have an avalanche of products. But, conceptually, the age of the average is over. The formula that helped Americans hang together in the early postwar heyday of American prosperity and global influence is no longer operative. The ideology of the average rested on a vast oversimplification of American life. It is remarkable that it lasted so long, although it did so largely by effectively masking or obscuring wide differences and great inequalities in wealth, opportunity, education, justice, and other areas of economic and civic life. The challenge of exposing and analyzing the causes and consequences of these inequalities mobilized many in the generation that came of age in the 1960s, I among them. I will not tell that story here, except to say that many of us confronted the world of the average, exposed its excessive conformity, and refused to confuse equality with uniformity.

Ronald Reagan was perhaps the last president who thought he knew the average American. He recognized the fabricated character well enough to describe him or her: “By average American,” he declaimed at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference, “I mean the good, decent, rambunctious, and creative people who raise the families, go to church, and help out when the local library holds a fundraiser; people who have a stake in the community because they are the community.”3131xRonald Reagan, Remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 1, 1985, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project; https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259935.

But that description was already obsolete. There was a brief interlude of self-congratulation reminiscent of the 1950s in the 1990s, when the optimistic vision of Herbert Croly’s American promise briefly returned after the collapse of the Soviet Union.3232xHerbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1909). The end of the Cold War raised hope that globalization under American auspices would successfully export the American textbook vision of consumerism sustaining a middle-class ideology. Such wishful thinking lasted about a decade, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the attack on New York City’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. When I published Why the American Century? in 1998, in the midst of globalization, the image I chose for the cover was a striking 1953 photograph of a nuclear household of four—father, mother, and two children—surrounded by the cornucopia of consumer goods that abundance brought. An Italian translation came out the year after September 11, and its publisher chose as a cover, unbeknownst to me, a rendering of the Twin Towers before their destruction, with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground. A new reality was here.

Majority and average no longer converge in a broad middle class. The once-influential interpretive works of Chandler, Potter, Kuznets, Bell, and Rostow address another age. The trends they identified in middle class investment in the corporate world, belief in a flexible social structure, and faith in steady progress stand in sharp contrast with what we see in our highly polarized society. Overlapping majority and average, real or illusory, was critical in maintaining the egalitarian promise of American liberty, and with it a spirit of socially progressive inquiry. But the concept of the average American withered as the many excluded, in one fashion or another, from the assimilative center exposed its fallacy.

The New Dispensation

The questioning of the American promise came from all political persuasions. A few widely shared observations bear rehearsing, if only to underscore the demoralizing effects of our current situation.

In the field of business organization, an alternative conception of the business corporation emerged. Financial capitalism took over managerial capitalism. At the heart of Chandler’s thinking about the visible hand was the idea that managers cared about the long-term health of the organization (and theirs in the same movement). Milton Friedman had no use for Chandler when he argued that a corporate executive was merely an “agent” on behalf of his (or her) employers—i.e., the stockholders—and not a “principal.” As Friedman noted in his book Capitalism and Freedom, “there is only one social responsibility of business[:] to increase its profits...in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”3333xMilton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html; see also Kyle Edward Williams, “The Myth of the Friedman Doctrine,” The Hedgehog Review, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 20–31; https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/the-myth-of-the-friedman-doctrine. The trend toward tangible return on investment has also affected scientific fields heretofore granted more time to produce usable outcome. Biologists must generate marketable drugs, computer scientists practical applications.3434xPaul Scherz, “Trivial Pursuits: The Decline of Scientific Research,” The Hedgehog Review, vol. 18, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 80–89; https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-cultural-contradictions-of-modern-science/articles/trivial-pursuits-the-decline-of-scientific-research.

Wealth inequality has returned, and the twenty-first century has been dubbed a new Gilded Age. The center is bulging no more. Documenting the change, economist Thomas Piketty stood as the opposite of Kuznets, who had posited ever-greater equality. Piketty explained the growing level of inequality with the simple observation that investors’ returns on investments were consistently higher than the national growth rate (r > g). As a result, people with invested capital had been getting richer while folks on salary were losing ground. The upper decile’s share of income increased from 30 to 35 percent of national income in the 1970s to 45 to 50 percent in the 2000s.3535xThomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 294. With calls to “Occupy Wall Street,” the “99 percent” publicly demonstrated in fall 2011 against the “1 percent” earning 48 percent of national income.

Whither the American Dream under these new conditions? There is a definite lack of optimism about the future. Surveys tend to vary widely, depending on how economically fragile people may feel at given times, but trends persist. A poll reported in July 2022 showed a whopping 58 percent either do not think the American Dream even exists or are not sure if it exists.3636xYouGov poll July 1–6, 2022, on the American Dream; https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/43117-american-dream-yougov-poll-july-1-6-2022?redirect_from=%2Ftopics%2Fpolitics%2Farticles-reports%2F2022%2F07%2F11%2Famerican-dream-yougov-poll-july-1-6-2022. The Wall Street Journal reported a similar figure in November 2023.3737xAaron Zitner, “Voters See American Dream Slipping Out of Reach,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2023.

Deindustrialization (an outcome of globalization) has been one of the main reasons for Americans’ loss of faith in future well-being in a broad center. In terms reminiscent of William Graham Sumner’s “forgotten man” in the Gilded Age, Ben Bradlee Jr., former editor of the Boston Globe, wrote tellingly in The Forgotten about working-class, union-affiliated residents of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, a Democratic stronghold since the 1960s, voting for Trump in 2020.3838xBen Bradlee Jr., The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America (New York, NY: Little, Brown, 2018). Indeed, the 2020 election was the opposite of the 1952 election. Mistrust replaced consensus. Twenty percent of Americans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen.3939xChicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) and National Opinion Research Center (NORC), “Understanding Support for Political Violence in America: Chicago Project on Security and Threats Omnibus Survey, June 2023 Wave 2,” p. 2; https://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/cpost/i/docs/2023-06_CPOST-NORC_Political_Violence_Survey_Report.pdf?mtime=1690317909. A troubling and palpable sense of fragility has enveloped our lives. The far-right takeover of the GOP shows there is no sentiment to adhere to a common narrative or patience for compromise.4040xCarl Hulse, “Behind Johnson’s Rise, A GOP Consumed by the Far Right,” New York Times, November 25, 2023. How much longer will the US Constitution save democracy from those who attempt to subvert it?

Returning to Inquiry as Hope?

I want to return in closing to the spirit of inquiry as a force for the common good. In the world we have lost, we managed complexity by finding the average and making it a norm. But we did not sacrifice complexity. I can testify to the commitment to inquiry in the academic communities where I have spent my life exploring conflicting ideas in conversation with students and colleagues. Communities of inquiry generated a wide array of dialogues within and across them. The contrast with today is real. Critics—not all of them conservatives—point out that too many academic communities in the humanities and social science have fragmented into soundproof chambers where members engage in a mix of theory and special pleading. The once-prevalent conviction that American social inquiry, born as the academic offspring of the late-nineteenth-century Social Gospel movement, works for the common good is rightly challenged.

But while this critique is to be taken seriously, something more important is transforming the world of inquiry and taking precedence. There have been seismic shifts in both the transmission of information and the methods of investigation. A new research paradigm has emerged. Today, any curious person has access to endless realms of information available electronically, independent from academic gatekeepers.

Critics have issued warnings about the dangers of the information revolution for a long time. Thus Langdon Winner, a humanities professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, argued in a book appropriately titled Autonomous Technology (1977), that computer users were in danger of becoming passive recipients of algorithmically generated outcomes.4141xLangdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977). See esp. ch. 7, “Complexity and the Loss of Agency.” The danger has grown exponentially with the ever-expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence, sustained by huge financial investments. Fearing misuse ranging the gamut of human activity, defenders of human intelligence are pulling the alarm. They correctly point to “epistemic anarchy” and the “proliferation of misinformation.”4242xJames Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 306. What this means for sustaining the spirit of inquiry and keeping it in service of democracy is a big question for all of us to ponder.

By temperament as a historian, I am not inclined toward prediction, but I want to express hope as well as fear. We have overcome the presumably unprecedented threats technological innovations posed to human agency before, and we will again. Two powerful forces that sustained the spirit of inquiry in the age of the average—investment in science and research and development, and the democratization of postsecondary education—are still operating today. The federal government’s commitment to science, unshakable during the Cold War, has admittedly slowed. Total government investments in R&D have declined from around 2 percent of GDP during the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s to about 0.7 percent of GDP today.4343xJeff Tollefson, “US Science Agencies on Track to Hit 25-Year Funding Low,” Nature 622 (2023): 438–439; https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03135-x. Presidential leadership has wavered. Thus, Trump left the directorship of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy vacant for almost two years and reduced its staff from President Obama’s 130 to about fifty.4444xLauren Morello, “Donald Trump Finally Has a White House Science Adviser,” Nature, January 3, 2019; https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00015-1. But Biden has restored the office to its full staffing level.4545xSee OSTP document “OSTP Staff as of October 2, 2023,” retrieved March 1, 2024, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/OSTP-Staff-List_October-2023.pdf. And the country still leads the world in absolute funding for research and development, when both public and private investments are factored in.4646xTollefson, “US Science Agencies on Track to Hit 25-Year Funding Low.”

Against opinion casting doubt on the benefit of a college degree and expressing pessimism about graduate school, I still see the bright side of academia as the only professional milieu devoted to a unique combination of investigation and education. Research universities remain robustly funded. The NSF’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics recently reported that total university R&D spending since 2012 has risen by an average of 1.6 percent annually in inflation-adjusted dollars.4747xMichael T. Gibbons, “R&D Expenditures at U.S. Universities Increased by $8 Billion in FY 2022,” NCES InfoBrief; https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24307. Regardless of some alarming claims, four-year colleges have weathered the COVID-19 crisis, and their mission is still to infuse the spirit of inquiry into the new generations. The National Center for Education Statistics finds that college enrollments have remained steady.4848xSee National Center for Education Statistics, “Digest of Education Statistics,” Table 303.70; https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_303.70.asp. Staffing statistics also reflect stability, not decline. The number of full-time faculty actually increased by 11 percent while the number of part-time faculty decreased by 13 percent from fall 2011 to fall 2022.4949xNational Center for Education Statistics (2023), “Characteristics of Postsecondary Faculty,” Condition of Education (US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences). Retrieved March 1, 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/csc.

These figures suggest that the academic infrastructure is solid, and we have the means to infuse a rejuvenated sense of mission in academic life as so many of us are taking the measure of the forces tearing us asunder. The issue is whether we have the will to do so. Sustaining a spirit of inquiry bound by proven disciplinary standards remains, in my view, the best hope for participants in academic life—teachers and students—to adapt their knowledge strategies to the new tools of investigation, mold them, invent other ones, and therefore continue to make inquiry the “democratic password,” to borrow John Dewey’s phrase of more than a century ago.5050xJohn Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1900), 56.

With thanks to my friends Guy Aiken, Arthur Goldhammer, Maurice Kriegel, and Paul Scherz, who kindly read a draft of this essay.