Why the American Century?

by Olivier Zunz

Overview

Reinterpreting our country's rise to world power, Olivier Zunz shows how American elites appropriated the twentieth century. Policymakers, corporate managers, engineers, scientists, and social scientists promoted a social contract of abundance and a controversial theory of pluralism. Their efforts created a model of middle class behavior for America and for the rest of the world.

"It should certainly be the task of historians to explain the nation's triumphs as effectively as they have explained its failures, and Zunz in this intelligent, learned and ambitious book suggests a valuable new model for doing so."—Alan Brinkley, Times Literary Supplement

"Zunz is evenhanded in his judgments. . . . His thesis is both imaginative and well grounded in the appropriate sources."—David M. Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review

"Zunz is an innovative and perceptive social critic. He crosses disciplinary boundaries with ease and felicity, and is particularly adept at illustrating large themes with unusual but telling details."—Kent Blaser, American Studies

"An eye-opening introduction to the shaping of modern America."—Foreign Affairs

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226994611
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Olivier Zunz is the Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Collège de France. He is the author of Why the American Century?, and Making America Corporate, 1870-1920, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Preface: "The New Colossus"
Pt. 1: Making the Century American
Ch. 1: Producers, Brokers, and Users of Knowledge
Ch. 2: Defining Tools of Social Intelligence
Ch. 3: Inventing the Average American
Pt. 2: The Social Contract of the Market
Ch. 4: Turning out Consumers
Ch. 5: Deradicalizing Class
Pt. 3: Embattled Identities
Ch. 6: From Voluntarism to Pluralism
Ch. 7: Enlarging the Polity
Pt. 4: Exporting American Principles
Ch. 8: Individualism and Modernization
Ch. 9: The Power of Uncertainty
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Zunz seeks to demonstrate how America came to arrogate the voice of didactic moralism and push manifest destiny beyond its own borders....[He] takes as his ultimate subject not just the origin, contours, and consequences of capitalism, but, more interestingly, the American desire to propagate it abroad and, finally, the unfeasibility of succeeding in the venture. -- Boston Book Review

Charles Davis

Zunz is a historian with a novelist's eye; he tells us about small things as well as big, because he wants to see the universe in a grain of sand. -- New Republic

David Landes

[The book emphasizes] the role of mass consumption in America's spectactular economic success....His thesis is both imaginative and well grounded in the appropriate sources. What he lacks is the narrative skill to make his thesis come alive. —The New York Times Book Review

David M. Oshinsky

In February 1941, Henry Luce famously proclaimed that the United States could and should dominate the remainder of the century--the nation deserved no less than to dictate the course of world history. In recent years, such an assertion would raise a storm of protest, yet Zunz's (Making America Corporate) wide-ranging research documents how complicated the case truly is. Zunz starts with Luce, who, he reminds us, was speaking for a liberal internationalism that represented myriad voices and was, at that moment, aimed at bringing the U.S. into WWII. Separating the idea of the "American century" from the "Pax Americana," Zunz argues that Americans started the century with "two large but unfinished projects": the creation of a continent-wide industrial economy and the expansion of democratic institutions within their own population. Zunz follows an impressive number of American paths towards these goals: scientists learned to harmonize science and industry; social scientists channeled their interest in analyses of culture as a whole into government policy; economists encouraged consumerism as a road to social stability; and the population in general was taught to think of itself as a pluralist entity rather than in particular sections. These were the goals that the U.S. then exported (most notably to Japan), but the "enlarged scale of their operations" abroad also furthered both projects at home. While occasionally dry, the book takes sweeping, thought-provoking account of the failures and successes of those who created the century's American model.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The phrase "the American Century" was coined by Henry Luce in the early 1940s to connote the growing importance of America's position of leadership in world affairs. Zunz (history, Univ. of Virginia) has written an intriguing account of "the ways big business, government, and the expanding sector of higher education built a partnership in the late 19th century and early 20th to engineer and manage a new America." This new America, he says, represented a kind of "export model" that promised technological progress, consumer fulfillment, and formal democratic participation for those who adopted entreprenuerial values and accepted American hegemony. "More than other people," argues Zunz, "[Americans] have put on the world agenda their understanding of the relationship among national wealth, individual freedom, and personal well-being." Zunz's own stance toward America's international influence is sympathetic but marked by a degree of ambivalence. His book details how informal institutional relationships developed in the first decades of the century provided a crucial underpinning to America's global role in the second half. -- Kent Worcester, Marymount Manhattan College, New York

Library Journal

It should certainly be the task of historians to explain the nation's triumphs as effectively as they have explained it's failures, and Zunz in this intelligent, learned and ambitious book suggests a valuable model for doing so.
&151#; The Times Literary Supplement

Alan Brinkley