Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History

Description

Conventional stories about American history, its origins and unfolding, do not feature capitalism. Other tales about the country's history usually take priority. If capitalism figures at all, it is to foreground opportunity, entrepreneurial vigour, material abundance, and the seven-league boots of manifest destiny. Conflict may rear its unseemly face-but only episodically, as a kind of alien or aberrant detour off the main road of America's exceptional career in world history. Instances of serious social discord, when they draw notice, are transcended-a course correction that allows the utopian project to resume. In this collection of essays, Steve Fraser corrects the record, rewriting the arc of the American saga with capitalism and class conflict centre-stage and mounting a serious challenge to the consoling fantasy of American exceptionalism. Working through the central concepts of political economics-unemployment and risk, unfree labour and household debt-he demonstrates that class is a deeply structuring feature of American political life, and an invaluable heuristic for reading American politics in the longue duree.

Steve Fraser is a historian, writer, and editor. His research and writing have pursued two main lines of inquiry: labour history and the history of American capitalism.

"A spirited collection by an erudite and penetrating essayist. Fraser is an analyst of the culture of late capitalism and, among other things, he demonstrates with impressive clarity the connections between the economic changes we call neoliberalism and the psycho-cultural dramas generated by the siren song of faux populism." -- FRANCES FOX PIVEN, AUTHOR OF POOR PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS "Steve Fraser is our most incisive and encompassing cultural historian of the two gilded ages that structured American society and its economic ethos in the decades that have bracketed the nation's fleeting New Deal interregnum. Fraser has captured the emotive logic of capitalist hegemony and the dark appeal it has so often held for millions of acquiescent Americans." -- NELSON LICHTENSTEIN, AUTHOR OF WHO BUILT AMERICA? "In this collection of bracing essays, Fraser brings to the fore the perils and promise of class warfare and the daunting challenges faced by everyone who hopes to defy history and work for a just society." -- JACQUELINE JONES, AUTHOR OF GODDESS OF ANARCHY "These essays show that Steve Fraser has long been one of the wisest and most eloquent historians of American capitalism and its discontents. Erudite, passionate, and laced with wit, they are essential reading during our era of great perils and budding hopes for change." -- MICHAEL KAZIN, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY "Fraser is our preeminent historian of America as a capitalist civilization. No one is more attuned to the inner vibrations of our monied culture." -- COREY ROBIN, AUTHOR OF THE REACTIONARY MIND One of our best social historians set the record straight about the mythologies of American capitalism. -- Peter Dreier, author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century [The essays] display his encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. history, especially working-class history. -- Gabriel Winant * New Republic *